The LifeStraw® Concept
- The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) call for a reduction of the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water by half between 1990 and 2015. Yet, an estimated 884 million people in the world, 37% of whom live in Sub-Saharan Africa, still use unimproved sources of drinking water.
- Treating water at the household level or other point of use also reduces the risk of waterborne disease arising from recontamination during collection, transport, and use in the home, a well-known cause of water-quality degradation3. In many rural and urban areas of the developing world, household water-quality interventions can reduce diarrhoea morbidity by more than 40%. Treating water in the home offers the opportunity for significant health gains at potentially dramatic cost savings over conventional improvements in water supplies, such as piped water connections to households.
- Water filters have been shown to be the most effective interventions amongst all point-of-use water treatment methods for reducing diarrhoeal diseases7. The Cochrane review demonstrates that it is not enough to treat water at the point-of-source; it must also be made safe at the point-of-consumption.
- LifeStraw® and LifeStraw® Family are both point-of-use water interventions – truly unique offerings from Vestergaard Frandsen that address the concern for affordably obtaining safe drinking water at home and outside. These complementary safe water tools have the potential to accelerate progress towards the MDG target of providing access to safe drinking water, which would yield health and economic benefits; thus contributing to the achievement of other MDGs like poverty reduction, childhood survival, school attendance, gender equality and environment sustainability.
Information and Media taken from Vestergaard Frandsen website @: http://www.vestergaard-frandsen.com/lifestraw & http://www.sageglobal.org
Doing Well By Doing Good 