Question: what countries to you want to help with your discovery and who would benefit fromt the invention

Harriet Aitken answered on 18 Jun 2014:

At the moment my system focuses on the removal of arsenic – it doesn’t have a taste or smell and is colourless when dissolved in water. Arsenic poisoning has some terrible side effects including skin disease, heart failure and is also known to cause a variety of cancers. Unfortunately, even a very small amount of arsenic in water is very bad for you – a concentration above 0.00001g per litre of water is thought to put you at risk.

There are millions of people around the world that drink water above this concentration every day. One of the worst affected areas is Bangladesh, although other many countries including China, Chile and Argentina are also affected.

The technology we are trying to develop aims to use materials that can be found locally, reducing costs. The main goal is to produce a system that will benefit people who live in rural communities that cannot afford expensive systems, we are a little way off yet though 🙂