Clean Water Disinfection Research Paper

Clean water has been one of the most important challenges for many people in the world, especially in developing countries. Numerous people in poor countries don’t have access to clean water for drinking, which leads to a considerable risk of sickness. In reality, most of all diarrhea diseases are results of contaminated water1 with an estimated morbidity of 1 billion and a mortality of 2.2 million per year.2 This issue not only influences the health in communities, but also can prevent development through economic pressure caused by treatment of patients and decrease the number of people in the workforce.3 To overcome these challenges, providing cleaner water by treating contaminated water sources is the best option, and disinfection processes

Since using chlorine in disinfection process showed its disadvantages in developed countries, it should not be practiced in developing countries because they will eventually face the increase in mortality caused by DBPs.7 One of the newest methods for disinfection is photocatalytic processes. Recently, the application of these technologies in water treatment demonstrated an exciting opportunity to find a cheap, environmentally friendly, and sustainable treatment technology.8 By using photocatalysts such as TiO2 and fullerenes, in the presence of UV irradiation or even sunlight, which would be a suitable method for many different developing countries, the formation of most hazardous by-products can be avoided, and the ideal result of the disinfection process can be

Most of the research showed that the destruction of cell membrane is the main reason of inactivation. It has been also indicated that TiO2 can cause damage to Amino Acids and DNA. Researchers have suggested a number of mechanisms for this process. Based on the deconstruction of cell structure, the most important targets which can play a key role in inactivation process are extracellular and intracellular target sites. For extracellular target sites, the most convincing research showed that lipids are the major targets for oxidative radical attack. For intracellular target sites, there is no study regarding degradation of vital enzymes as a part of inactivation, but superoxide can directly inactivate a group of enzymes. It appears that DNA is vulnerable to oxidative stress. Damage to nucleic acid in photocatalytic processes is an indirect result of superoxide