Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach for introducing to a non-scientific audience a major public health issue: access to safe drinking water. Access to safe drinking water is a privilege in developed countries and an urgent need in the third world, which implies always more efficient and reliable engineering tools to be developed. As a major global challenge it is important to make children aware of this problem for understanding (i) what safe drinking water is, (ii) how ingenious techniques are developed for this purpose and (iii) the role of microfluidics in this area. This paper focuses on different microfluidic-based techniques to separate and detect pathogens in drinking water that have been adapted to be performed by a young audience in a simplified, recreational and interactive way.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 947-957 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | Lab on a Chip |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Early online date | 19 Nov 2014 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 21 Feb 2015 |
Funding
HB would like to acknowledge The Royal Academy of Engineering/EPSRC for her research fellowship. Both HB and MJ would like to acknowledge EU funding for the project “AQUAVALENS: protecting the health of Europeans by improving methods for the detection of pathogens in drinking water and water used in food preparation”.
Keywords
- bacteria
- drinking water
- microfluidic analytical techniques
