Micro-filtration - a way to improve family health

Beside the fact that a huge effort still is needed to provide safe drinking water at community and family level, there are many different ways to make safe drinking water available and affordable for family use in low-cost countries and emergencies. Chlorination is the most common practice both for providing safe water at large-scale schemes for villages or urban settlements by batch treatment and for families by disinfecting the collected water with tablets. This way of providing safe water has many advantages mainly because it makes the water safe also during carrying it home and handling it at family place. The provision of safe water relies on the proper dosing of chlorine and the availability of chlorine in the respective form, such as powder, tablets, liquid gas, etc. However, chlorination has also been difficult to introduce due to the changes in water taste, which has often made the population to go back to non-treated traditional sources. Usually, an effort is needed in health education to make a community to accept and to welcome chlorinated water as a safer drinking water supply. In conclusion from many water projects, it can be said that the taste change of the drinking water is an underestimated obstacle in improving the health of a population by providing treated water.