LifeStraw battles waterborne disease in Kenya
Posted: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 2:14 PM
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On Assignment
By Martin Fletcher, NBC News Tel Aviv Bureau Chief
You hear a lot these days about sustainable resources, forest degradation, sensitive ecosystems and water-borne disease. So much that it all begins to fade into incomprehensible eco-jargon. A bit like the war of the Bosnian-Herzogovians against the Serbo-Croats, which one writer described as a war of the unspellables against the unpronounceables. It all seems a long way away. What’s it got to do with me?
But up close and personal, it’s different. In a clinic near the Masai Mara in Kenya, the smallest unit of the Kenyan health system, my NBC News team and I crammed into the tiny room of surgical officer Richard Lemiso, and watched as a stream of worried mothers entered carrying their sick babies. Most had walked miles to visit this last beacon of hope, the man in the white coat.
Fever, diaorreah, stomach cramps, vomiting, sweating. The tiny faces either serene in sleep, or contorted in pain. The mood – resigned. The cause was almost always the same – dirty water. The diagnosis – typhoid, dysentery, dehydration, all potential killers.
This is the process, put very simply: trees have been cut for firewood, or died from disease, or been broken by large animals like elephants near the water springs. This allows other animals and cattle to approach and their feces and germs to enter the water source. That changes the balance between water for animals and water for people, dirtying the water available for villagers.
In other words, forest degradation harms the sensitive ecosystem, which reduces sustainable resources and leads to waterborne disease.
Read the rest of Martin Fletcher's blog about the LifeStraw - a new water filter that may be a revolutionary way to create potable water in the developing world - in the Daily Nightly blog. His story from Kenya, part of NBC Nightly News' special series "Thirsty Planet," will air Wednesday night.
