Abul Hussam, an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Virginia’s George Mason University has been named one of TIME Magazine’s Heroes of the Environment for 2007 for inventing the SONO filter, an arsenic-removing, point-of-use home water filter. Hussam, who was born in the Kushtia district of Bangladesh but has been living in the USA since 1978, invented the filter in 2004 after devoting much of his life to finding an easy and cheap solution to arsenic contamination. In February 2007, he won the Grainger Challenge Gold Award from the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for the SONO filter. Hussam said he donated 70 per cent of his US$ 1 million (EUR 684,000) prize money to buying thousands of filters for affected villagers in Bangladesh The rest he said he will use to refine the filter's design.

See Abul Hussam's TIME profile

Source: WaterTech Online, 31 Oct 2007 ; AFP, 2 Nov 2007

Tags: water quality