I heard about the Life Straw while I was at a kid’s birthday party last weekend. The father of a friend of mine showed me the article in a magazine. I think it was a recent issue of Time. This straw sure would have come in handy when I was drinking Niger River water years ago. (See post.)
The Life Straw wasn’t created with tourists in mind. If you took the global knowledge quiz, you would have found out that over 1 billion people in the world don’t have clean water. Treating water to make it drinkable and not a disease carrier is a problem in most places. The Life Straw though, is designed to filter out the things that make water unsafe. The user sucks water through the straw where it is cleaned as it passes through. Really amazing.
The straw was named by Time magazine in 2005 as one of best inventions. Now, it’s in the market and could really make a difference in the lives of all people. Cholora, typhoid, dysentery and diarrhoea will hopefully fade into the past. Picking up one of the straws before you head out to a place where the water is dicey might be a good idea. It’s light and it packs easily.
Here is the facts page from the company that makes its Web site so you can learn more about what it does and how it works. And here’s an earlier write up about it in gizmag.