Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Drinking Nasty Swamp Water (to save the world)" video.

  1. Mark, this is an awesome initiative, and it is sorely needed... but I have to point out some stuff so that people do not get the wrong idea from the video. It's extra information for the sake of completion, if you are not interested just skip my comment and support it as is because like said, this saves lives! The product itself was made and tested in conjunction with the CDC, which is good, and it seems it's going fine for a while now... it's not a super new thing, communities have been benefiting from it for years now - it's ok if you never heard of it, and it's awesome that people like Mark is talking about it. So even for the most paranoid, at least give it the benefit of doubt. But the way Mark demonstrated on the video is not exactly the way it should be used. https://www.cdc.gov/safewater/flocculant-filtration.html The muddy water gets floculated and decanted, then the cleared portion of the water has to pass through a cloth filter, and then a 20 minute wait period for hypoclorite to take action. It's not shake, wait for it to clear and drink. Hopefully, in Mark's own video he made all the steps, it just passed a wrong idea because of editing. :P Also, just so people know, this isn't exactly perfect... it is easy to use and convenient, which are high priorities for the places it's going, but from the CDC accessment: "has also been documented to reduce diarrheal disease from 90% to less than 16% incidence in five randomized, controlled health intervention studies". It's of course still very very good, probably among the best results possible so far from such a system, but not exactly perfect. So, don't go using something like this yourself if it isn't needed. The usual problem with purification systems advertisement is that killing 99% or 99.99% of bacteria, virus or protozoa does not mean reducing the potential of getting ill by the same ammount, unfortunately. Basically because contaminated water can have so many of those in there that 0.01% still could have an effect. Water purification is a super hard problem. There has been an independent WHO study for those curious on water purification systems that includes this one: https://www.who.int/household_water/scheme/scheme-r1_keyfindings_8feb2016.pdf Not sure if it's the same version that is currently in use since this study was made back in 2014, but this floculant received 2 stars while another well know product (Lifestraw) received 3 stars for the resulting water test. Of course, this doesn't mean investing in this one is bad.... these packets seems way easier to use for high volumes of water in comparison to a filtration system like Lifestraw, specially with very turbid water. Lifestraw itself has advantages like it could be used multiple times, and is even more effective in eliminating stuff from water, but it's also not as cheap to make, not as cheap to transport, and the filters can clog if the water is too dirty... not to mention stuff like cross contamination, flow rate, among others. Which is to say, there are advantages and disadvantages in both systems. I mean, I'm no specialist, but this is my guesstimation. Again, this is not to put down the initiative or whatever, just to provide more information for those in doubt if it's worth - it is.
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