THE CHEAT SHEET. Theresa’s book of life

Perhaps, but it deals with something quite mundane.

Theresa Dankovich is a post-doctoral associate at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She has developed a book that can help people clean water. Experts say the book can become a life-saver for millions in the poor and developing countries.

You heard me right. You may call it a “drinkable book”. Anyone using the book can simply tear out its pages and use them to filter water. The pages are coated with nanoparticles of silver or copper, which, I’m sure you’d know, can destroy bacteria in the water as it passes through.

Well, you first collect the water from any source — a river, pond, tap or well — in a simple filter holder and all you need to do is tear out a page from the book and put it in the filter. Voilà! clean water — and dead bacteria as well. The page releases silver ions, which make microbes that get near them inactive.

Dankovich and team had tested the paper in the lab using artificially contaminated water and found success. Then they ran field trials for over two years. The researchers tested it at 25 contaminated water sources in South Africa, Ghana and Bangladesh, and found that the paper successfully removed more than 99 per cent of bacteria that cause waterborne diseases such as typhoid, cholera, hepatitis and E. coli.

That said, even though the paper appears to kill bacteria successfully, it is yet to be checked whether it destroys disease-causing micro-organisms such as protozoa and viruses.

Dankovich’s tests show that one page can clean up to 100 litres of water. They claim that one book could filter one person’s drinking water supply for four years. Interestingly, the book also has printed information on how and why water should be filtered — in English and local languages — helping people understand the need for filtering and making good use of the chemical paper.

Moreover, the filter is portable and easy-to-use, and unlike other water cleaning methods that use chlorine or iodine, the researchers claim there is no off-taste to the water that is filtered.

As things stand now, this remains just an experiment. Dankovich recently presented her findings at the American Chemical Society’s 250th National Meeting & Exposition in Boston, Massachusetts, and has won accolades. The researcher says the project is directed towards communities in developing countries. Dankovich and colleagues hope they can step up production of the paper, which they make by hand at the moment, and move on to trials in which local residents use the filters themselves.

Water-borne diseases kill nearly 9 lakh people around the globe every year. That’s an average 2,400 deaths a day. More than 750 million people do not have access to clean drinking water today. That’s more than twice the population of the entire US! In Africa itself, there are over 350 million people without access to clean water. What makes Dankovich’s experiment important is its low cost and easiness.

Out of all the technologies available — ceramic filters, UV sterilisation and so on — this is a promising one, because it’s cheap, and it’s a catchy idea that people can understand and put to use. Globally, more than 80 per cent of the people who lack access to safe water live in villages. And that’s why Dankovich wants to target the poor and developing countries.

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