A Company Prospers by Saving Poor People’s Lives
Social entrepreneurship at its finest! I hope I could be involved with a company like this in the future.
Children in the Lira district of Uganda using the LifeStraw. The personal water filtration device costs about $3 to make. (Vestergaard Frandsen)
A Company Prospers by Saving Poor People’s Lives (NYT):
...Vestergaard-Frandsen...Its products are in use in refugee camps and disaster areas all over the third world: PermaNet, a mosquito net impregnated with insecticide; ZeroFly, a tent tarp that kills flies; and the LifeStraw, a filter worn around the neck that makes filthy water safe to drink.
Some are not only life-saving but even beautiful. The turquoise and navy blue LifeStraw is in museum design collections.
“Vestergaard is just different from other companies we work with,” said Kevin Starace, malaria adviser for the United Nations Foundation. “They think of the end user as a consumer rather than as a patient or a victim.”
For example, he said, they have added a cellphone pocket to their bed nets, and make window curtains that kill bugs....
In 1998, they became a supplier to the Carter Center, which was founded by former President Jimmy Carter and was leading the global effort to eliminate guinea worm. The worms start life as microscopic larvae inside tiny pondwater fleas but, once swallowed by people, emerge a year later as yard-long strands resembling fine spaghetti but wiggling out of acid-filled blisters, causing excruciating pain.
The center needed mesh filters fine enough to strain out the larvae but tough enough to survive stretching over a water jar. Vestergaard made squares of nylon strainer reinforced with canvas.
The company is “very reliable and they have good quality control,” said Dr. Ernesto Ruiz-Tiben, the director of the guinea-worm program. “We’ve bought millions of dollars’ worth of product from them.”
The company also recreated an idea that Dr. Ruiz-Tiben got from Tuareg nomads in Mali: packing the filter into a short plastic pipe so the user could lie down and drink from any puddle. Later versions replaced the cloth with fine metal mesh.
That pipe was the inspiration for the LifeStraw, a 10-inch plastic cylinder that filters out or kills bacteria, parasites and some viruses and can be made for less than $3.
Early versions used iodine beads and a charcoal filter to lessen the iodine taste. New ones use hollow-fiber technology.
To promote the straws, Torben has let television crews film him drinking out of Copenhagen’s canals and even a toilet.
“That was awful,” he admitted. “It was a ladies’ toilet, and they put in some odor chemical to make it smell better, and LifeStraw doesn’t take out chemicals. And the canals have salt from the seawater. It can’t filter that, so I drank a lot of salt.”
Aid agencies have bought tens of thousands for use after the Myanmar cyclone and earthquakes in Asia. The company now makes a bigger version that filters five gallons an hour with no iodine aftertaste and will last a typical family three years.
Torben said he had been asked by a wing commander from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk whether he could make a seawater-filtering version for downed pilots. He wished he could, he said, noting that many third-world wells are brackish, and poor villages on the ocean could use it too. But salt is too fine to remove without reverse osmosis, a technology that requires lots of power, he said....
Children in the Lira district of Uganda using the LifeStraw. The personal water filtration device costs about $3 to make. (Vestergaard Frandsen)
A Company Prospers by Saving Poor People’s Lives (NYT):
...Vestergaard-Frandsen...Its products are in use in refugee camps and disaster areas all over the third world: PermaNet, a mosquito net impregnated with insecticide; ZeroFly, a tent tarp that kills flies; and the LifeStraw, a filter worn around the neck that makes filthy water safe to drink.
Some are not only life-saving but even beautiful. The turquoise and navy blue LifeStraw is in museum design collections.
“Vestergaard is just different from other companies we work with,” said Kevin Starace, malaria adviser for the United Nations Foundation. “They think of the end user as a consumer rather than as a patient or a victim.”
For example, he said, they have added a cellphone pocket to their bed nets, and make window curtains that kill bugs....
In 1998, they became a supplier to the Carter Center, which was founded by former President Jimmy Carter and was leading the global effort to eliminate guinea worm. The worms start life as microscopic larvae inside tiny pondwater fleas but, once swallowed by people, emerge a year later as yard-long strands resembling fine spaghetti but wiggling out of acid-filled blisters, causing excruciating pain.
The center needed mesh filters fine enough to strain out the larvae but tough enough to survive stretching over a water jar. Vestergaard made squares of nylon strainer reinforced with canvas.
The company is “very reliable and they have good quality control,” said Dr. Ernesto Ruiz-Tiben, the director of the guinea-worm program. “We’ve bought millions of dollars’ worth of product from them.”
The company also recreated an idea that Dr. Ruiz-Tiben got from Tuareg nomads in Mali: packing the filter into a short plastic pipe so the user could lie down and drink from any puddle. Later versions replaced the cloth with fine metal mesh.
That pipe was the inspiration for the LifeStraw, a 10-inch plastic cylinder that filters out or kills bacteria, parasites and some viruses and can be made for less than $3.
Early versions used iodine beads and a charcoal filter to lessen the iodine taste. New ones use hollow-fiber technology.
To promote the straws, Torben has let television crews film him drinking out of Copenhagen’s canals and even a toilet.
“That was awful,” he admitted. “It was a ladies’ toilet, and they put in some odor chemical to make it smell better, and LifeStraw doesn’t take out chemicals. And the canals have salt from the seawater. It can’t filter that, so I drank a lot of salt.”
Aid agencies have bought tens of thousands for use after the Myanmar cyclone and earthquakes in Asia. The company now makes a bigger version that filters five gallons an hour with no iodine aftertaste and will last a typical family three years.
Torben said he had been asked by a wing commander from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk whether he could make a seawater-filtering version for downed pilots. He wished he could, he said, noting that many third-world wells are brackish, and poor villages on the ocean could use it too. But salt is too fine to remove without reverse osmosis, a technology that requires lots of power, he said....