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Invention of simple water treatment system to save children's lives

  • Invention of simple water treatment system to save children's lives

About the entity

Aquatabs
Aquatabs® is a tablet which is added to drinking water to kill most harmful micro-organisms. The tablet dissolves clear within minutes and disinfects the water within 30 minutes.

The world famous medical journal The Lancet has published the results of a two year health impact trial in Bangladesh. Less than 5% of studies submitted to this peer reviewed journal are published.

In this trial, the impact of using "Aquatabs Flo" at the inlet of a domestic tank water treatment system has been shown to reduce WHO-defined diarrhoea in children by over 25% compared to the control group (untreated water). Similar reductions were estimated for caregiver-defined diarrhoea.

The study also noted some other significant points:

  • "Previous blinded trials of household water treatment interventions in low-income settings have failed to detect a reduction in child diarrhoea".
  • "Previous water intervention trials have focused on household- level water treatment, (the) findings show that a low-cost automatic point-of-collection (community-level) water treatment intervention can achieve high uptake and reduce diarrhoea in a densely populated setting"
  • (The study) "detected significant improvements in stored household drinking water in the treatment group compared with the control group"


Aquatabs Flo, water disinfection at point of collection. Photo credit: Yoshika Crider (PRNewsfoto/Aquatabs)

Overall, the study interpreted the results of this trial to mean that, "Passive chlorination at the point of collection could be an effective and scalable strategy in low-income urban settings for reducing child diarrhoea and for achieving global progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 6.1 to attain universal access to safe and affordable drinking water."

Commenting on the result of the trial Mr. Michael Gately MD of Aquatabs said, "Under the very toughest conditions in Bangladesh, this system has now been proven beyond doubt and children's lives will be saved. It is the World's lowest-cost, automatic, no power required, tank water treatment system."

Mr Gately went on to say that Aquatabs Flo has now been installed in domestic water tanks in over 20,000 schools in Kenya & Nigeria by the social enterprise "Impact Water" with a confirmed target of over 40,000 schools by end of year 2019. Some 10 million children now have safe water with over 2 billion litres being treated per month.

Given the unprecedented results of this study, and subsequent success of the project rollout, the team at Aquatabs now seek further partners internationally, both from the NGO and Commercial communities for installation of this life changing system in water tanks of private homes throughout the Worlds emerging communities. 

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