Pittsburgh Dr. Creates A BOOK That Can Filter 99% of Bacteria From Water

[link to www.msn.com]

8/17/2015

snip: (less than 50%)

'Drinkable book' cleans murky water

"A book with pages that can be torn out to filter drinking water has proved effective in its first field trials.

The "drinkable book" combines treated paper with printed information on how and why water should be filtered.

Its pages contain nanoparticles of silver or copper, which kill bacteria in the water as it passes through.

In trials at 25 contaminated water sources in South Africa, Ghana and Bangladesh, the paper successfully removed more than 99% of bacteria.

The resulting levels of contamination are similar to US tap water, the researchers say. Tiny amounts of silver or copper also leeched into the water, but these were well below safety limits.

Dr Teri Dankovich, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, developed and tested the technology for the book over several years, working at McGill University in Canada and then at the University of Virginia.

"It's directed towards communities in developing countries," Dr Dankovich said, noting that 663 million people around the world do not have access to clean drinking water.

"All you need to do is tear out a paper, put it in a simple filter holder and pour water into it from rivers, streams, wells etc and out comes clean water - and dead bacteria as well," she told BBC news.

The bugs absorb silver or copper ions - depending on the nanoparticles used - as they percolate through the page.

"Ions come off the surface of the nanoparticles, and those are absorbed by the microbes," Dr Dankovich explained.

According to her tests, one page can clean up to 100 litres of water. A book could filter one person's water supply for four years.

Dr Dankovich had already tested the paper in the lab using artificially contaminated water. Success there led to the field trials which she conducted over the past two years, working with the charities Water is Life and iDE.

In these trials, the bacteria count in the water samples plummeted by well over 99% on average - and in most samples, it dropped to zero."