More about the Lifestraw

I posted about the Lifestraw, a straw that doesn’t suck, in August. Here it is a month later and the NY Times is just now getting around to covering the story. I scooped ‘em. It’s obvious that the Times turns to Touron Talk when they want to take the World’s Pulse.

“What’s relevant to our readers today?” Says the cigar smoking editor.

“I don’t know,” says the fedora wearing reporter. “I only went to Journalism School at Columbia. I better check Touron Talk written by a freelance freethinker with a degree in Anthropology and a license to dive.”

Never mind that I first read about the lifestraw in Wired magazine.

The Times article did bring up some interesting points about what the Lifestraw does not protect its suckers from:

It is less effective against viruses, which are much smaller and cause diseases like polio and hepatitis, and it wouldn’t protect American backpackers against the parasite giardia.

Nor does it filter out metals like arsenic, and it has a slight iodine aftertaste (not necessarily a bad thing in the large stretches of the globe with iodine deficiency).