Performance and Health Risk Assessment of Commercial Off-the-Shelf Individual Water Purifiers

摘要

This project assessed the performance and health risks of commercial- off-the-shelf (COTS) individual water purifiers (IWP) for use by individual warfighters to provide emergency treatment of field drinking water. This project had three discrete objectives: (1) Develop a military-use specific protocol for testing the efficiency and functionality of IWPs in producing microbiologically safe drinking water; (2) Gather and assess technical information on COTS IWPs and develop a shareable database of this information, and (3) Develop simple, direct recommendations for the warfighter on the lowest-risk IWPs to use. The Project Team successfully developed a military-use specific protocol for testing the efficiency and functionality of IWPs in producing microbiologically safe drinking water. NSF International has published this protocol as 'NSF Protocol P248 Emergency Military Operations Microbiological Water Purifiers.' The Project Team successfully developed a comparative, searchable, relational database of the technical specifications, operating characteristics, and pathogen removal capabilities of available COTS IWPs.