Drumsticks from Moringa (Moringa oleifera) are used extensively in Indian cooking. The leaf is an excellent vegetable additive.
Another facet of the tree known to indigenous communities is now getting scientific validation. The seeds of Moringa are an excellent base for purifying water.
A low-cost water purification technique published in Current Protocols in Microbiology is based on Moringa seeds. The technique can produce a 90.00% to 99.99% bacterial reduction in previously untreated water. Read this against fact that a billion people across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are estimated to rely on untreated surface water sources for their daily water needs. Of these, some two million are thought to die from diseases caught from contaminated water every year.
The researchers rates Moringa to be to be one of the world's most useful trees. Moringa tree seeds, when crushed into powder, can be used as a water-soluble extract in suspension. This acts as an effective natural clarification agent for highly turbid and untreated pathogenic surface water.
The paper has been made free to download as part of access programs under John Wiley & Sons' Corporate Citizenship Initiative. Read it here
No comments:
Post a Comment