Drop in the bucket
I like to tell our friends that my husband spends more time with his cell phone, satellite radio, and digital video recorder than he does with me. It's just a joke, of course, but he is a bit of a gadget hound. He's also a bit of a germophobe, so I wasn't surprised when he emailed me an article from the New York Times talking about new electronic water- purifying devices designed for travelers. The SteriPen and its cousin, the mUV, are portable battery-operated water purifiers that look like wands and use ultraviolet radiation to kill bacteria and other potentially harmful organisms in water. To use the device, you submerge the wand and swirl it around for anywhere from 48 seconds to a minute and a half, depending on the amount of water you're trying to clean. A little smiley-face icon appears on the LCD display at the top of the wand when the water is safe to drink. It's certainly not a bad invention. But, like a lot of technology, I have to wonder just how necessary it really is, particularly when there's a much simpler -- not to mention cheaper - - way to rid any questionable water you come across from impurities. So I replied to my husband's email by sending him an article Dr. Wright wrote a few years ago. In it, he talked about a friend of his who used this natural solution for 30 years to purify contaminated water while he traveled from village to village in Africa -- and he never got sick once. If you've been reading the eTips or Nutrition & Healing for awhile, you've undoubtedly heard of this natural solution before -- SSKI (which is short for saturated solution of potassium iodide). Just a few drops of SSKI offer all the disinfecting benefits of the new-fangled UV wands, but at a fraction of the price (the SteriPen retails for around $130, and even the less- expensive mUV still costs $50). And unlike most gadgets, SSKI serves more than one purpose. In fact, it has a myriad of other uses and health benefits. To read more about its potential beyond water purification, subscribers can visit the Nutrition & Healing website (www.wrightnewsletter.com) and download the November 2002 issue by logging on to the Archives with the username and password listed in your most recent newsletter. Source:
"Cleaner water with a wand (no magic required)," The New York Times (www.nytimes.com), 3/2/08 | 
