Environmental physicist Ashok Gadgil and colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are working to develop a simple and effective device that, along with a basic health education program, can greatly reduce people's risk of becoming infected through the water they drink. In the device, named UV Waterworks, the lamp lacks the phosphor coating that keeps other fluorescent lights from emitting ultraviolet radiation. The simplicity of the device is one of its strongest attributes. Because its major components are common and inexpensive, UV Waterworks is cheap to build and easy to maintain. The UV lamp, which will burn for about 8,000 hours, must be replaced yearly, but otherwise the device requires almost no maintenance.
Water flows through the device by gravity, and electricity is used only to generate the UV light.
WaterHealth International, the company that will manufacture UV Waterworks, estimates that when used to supply a community of 1,500-2,000 people, the total cost of disinfected drinking water would be about fifteen cents per person annually. This makes it affordable even by developing world standards. Disinfection and the Developing World For Gadgil, who lost five of his cousins in India to diarrheal disease, the objective was to build a device that would be inexpensive and easy to operate, making it practical for use in the developing world. Though many different disinfection schemes have been proposed and used in industrialized nations, none have been developed that meet the requirements of the world's poorest populations. UV waterworks may change that.