How LifeStraws Save Countless Lives

Many years ago, back in the 2007-2008 school year, the policy debate topic was public health assistance in Sub-Saharan Africa. I was not yet in high school, as I would enter the next year, but I would hear about the topic regardless.

Some of the various proposed cases, also known as affirmatives, were legendary. Cheap robotic rats would walk over landmines and blow them up to prevent public injury and death. Gustave the man-eating crocodile would be neutralized by the United States government. Another silly one, at least at the time, were these LifeStraws.

LifeStraws were a revolutionary piece of tech at the time. Unveiled in 2005 but largely undeployed, they were little straws that you would put into a source of drinkable, yet most likely highly polluted or diseased, water and it would, on the fly, do the filtration for you. As long as you had access to a body of water you could drink from it without fear of contracting sickness or disease from a single straw for about a year.

As they were nowhere near ready to be a mainstream product at the time, it was an investment that would theoretically require a huge amount of capital, and even then it was not clear whether its availability would ever be widespread. Now, in 2016, the answer is a little more clear. LifeStraws are a huge success that is helping millions of people in developing countries and victims of natural disasters alike.

A LifeStraw / CC by Badri Seshadri

How does it work? Well, a Cosmos Magazine article gets into the nitty-gritty of it but essentially there's a big filter at the bottom of it that filters out the big stuff (think insects, dirt) followed by several more filters where the holes are constantly decreasing in size, getting rid of more bacteria in each step. There's finally an ultra-filtration filter where incredibly tiny holes - just microscopic - get rid of the smallest viruses. A piece of carbon at the top of the straw gives the water a normal palate and prevents it from tasting horrific. Voilà! You have clean water.

Technology like this is the kind of benchmark we'll judge our age by. Decades from now society will look back on the early 21st century and talk about the strides we made as we started to really lock down the importance of resource access and humanitarianism. Living in America, it's easy to forget that access to water is still a gigantic problem in the world, but here humanity is, making it better every year.