A review of: Fouling in hollow fiber membrane microfilters used for household water treatment (2015) Murray, A., Goeb, M., Stewart, B., Hopper, C., Peck, J., Meub, C., Asatekin, A. & Lantagne, D. J. WASHDEV 5 (2), 220–228 doi:10.2166/washdev.2015.206

Over the past 5 years, hollow fiber membrane microfilters have been introduced into much of the developing world to combat waterborne illness stemming from microbially compromised water sources. One such filter, the PointONE™ Filter (Sawyer Corporation) has performed well in laboratory trials, in the 5 and 6 log reductions of protozoan parasites and bacteria, respectively (Hydreion LLC 2005). In a field study conducted in Cochabamba, Bolivia and recently published by Lindquist et al. (2014), households using PointONE filters had significantly less diarrheal disease compared with the control arm during the intervention period. Diarrheal prevalence ratios of 0.21 (95% confidence interval [95% CI] = 0.15–0.30) were observed for the filter arm and 0.27 (95% CI = 0.22–0.34) were observed for the filter and WASH BCC (education) arm. These diarrheal disease reductions occurred in only a 3-month intervention period, and showed marked improvement in the...