Industry, agriculture, wars, accidents or unfavourable natural conditions are all possible sources of chemical contamination of drinking water. Chemical pollutants (fertilizers, pesticides, heavy metals...) can cause various invalidating or mortal diseases.
Though most people are often unaware of such contaminations, they are a daily concern for millions of people. Unlike waterborne diseases, whose symptoms are observable very quickly, poisoning caused by the consumption of chemically polluted water is often slow-evolving and harmful on the long term. The link between the disease and its cause can therefore be harder to establish.
Chlorination cannot eliminate chemical pollutants in drinking water and efficient decontamination methods are often costly. Antenna Technologies therefore initiated several research programmes which aim at developing new remediation methods affordable to low-income populations.
Recently, Antenna Technologies has paid a more special attention to the issue of fluoride water contamination. In this case as in many others, purely technical solutions do exist but are not affordable to the most impacted populations. Thus, the whole difficulty lies in the identification of low-cost decontaminating materials and on the development of remediation protocols which are adapted to the local context.
To learn more, you can read the report of World Health Organisation (WHO): "New WHO report tackles fluoride in drinking-water"