As the world’s population expands and climate change sets in, our water woes are becoming increasingly severe. By 2025, half the world’s population will be living where the demand for safe water exceeds its supply.

Enter a new generation of bold solutions, from water purifiers that run on faeces to machines that work by filtering out particles using fizzy water. One of these is the LifeStraw, which cleans water by passing it through a bunch of long, hollow fibres encased in a plastic tube.

The original version works like a normal drinking straw; you simply plunge one end into some water, then suck through the other. Anything larger than two microns, or a hundredth of the thickness of a human hair, will be trapped inside before it makes it to your mouth. This includes 99.9% of parasites and 99.9999% of bacteria, such as those that cause cholera, dysentery and typhoid fever. When sipped through a LifeStraw, even the muddiest water comes out as clear as a mountain spring.

It all started back in 1996, when a Danish entrepreneur, Mikkel Frandsen, transformed his grandfather’s uniform manufacturing business to focus on improving the lives of people in Africa instead. The earliest version of the LifeStraw was created to help eradicate guinea worm, one of the most gruesome diseases to survive into the 21st Century.

It’s caused by a Russian doll of nasty things – dirty water, infected with fleas, infected with worm larvae. If you’re unlucky enough to drink any, the worms will mature and breed within your body over several months, eventually popping up at the surface of the skin where they try to wriggle through. The end result is often infections and, occasionally, amputated limbs. It’s excruciatingly painful and there’s no vaccine or drug that can treat it.

To begin with, the straw contained a simple streel mesh that could remove the relatively large fleas. Over the past two decades, Frandsen’s company has supplied the eradication effort with more than 37 million of them, which has helped to reduce the number of guinea worm cases from 3.5 million in 1986 to just 25 last year. “This will be the second disease ever eradicated,” says DeWitte.