Will Rogers (who died in 1935) once advised: “Always drink upstream from the herd.” That was good advice for cowboys then and equally good for hikers and outdoors folks today.

If you’re traveling to a foreign country, the odds-on advice is “Don’t drink the water!” Otherwise, depending on the country, you risk illness caused by giardia, cryptosporidium, bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli, and viruses such as hepatitis and poliovirus.

Here are some descriptions of these nasties I pulled from the Internet:

Cryptosporidium and giardia, found in both drinking and recreational water, cause diarrhea, dehydration, weight loss, stomach cramps or pain, fever, nausea, and vomiting.

Escherichia coli is an emerging cause of food-borne illness. An estimated 73,000 cases of infection and 61 deaths occur in the United States each year. Infection often leads to bloody diarrhea and occasionally to kidney failure. Most illness has been associated with eating undercooked, contaminated ground beef. Person-to-person contact in families and childcare centers is also an important mode of transmission. Infection can also occur after drinking raw milk and after swimming in or drinking sewage-contaminated water.

Salmonellosis is an infection from bacteria called salmonella. Most persons infected with salmonella develop diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps 12 to 72 hours after infection. The illness usually lasts four to seven days, and most persons recover without treatment. However, in some persons the diarrhea may be so severe that the patient needs to be hospitalized. In these patients, the salmonella infection may spread from the intestines to the bloodstream and then to other body sites and can cause death unless the person is treated promptly with antibiotics.

Yuck!

What if you could wave a magic wand and eliminate the risk of these bacteria and viruses? You could slake your thirst out of your favorite brook with wild abandon. And what if this magic wand were pocket-sized and tipped the scales at less than 8 ounces? Sounds like something you wouldn’t leave home without, right?

Well, it’s not magic and you can put one in your pocket for less than $150.

This wonder has been on the market for a couple of years and was recently featured in the “new products” section of an e-mail newsletter I receive from Paddling.net.

It is called SteriPEN, and the man behind the idea is living in Blue Hill. Miles Maiden told me he took a working concept, that of using ultraviolet light to disinfect water without altering its taste, and put it into a package that fits in the palm of your hand. His company is called Hydro-Photon Inc.

Disinfecting water by destroying microbes with UV light has been in use for more than 60 years, he said, primarily at bottling plants and more recently by some municipal water districts. The UV light will alter the DNA of nasties like cryptosporidium, quickly leaving it unable to replicate itself in your body. Chemical treatment would take a lot longer and likely alter the taste of the water (think of tasting chlorinated water or that iodine taste you get from water treatment pills).

There’s nothing better tasting than water fresh from a babbling brook, is there? Just the thought of bending down and scooping up a double handful of cold, fresh water makes me want to head for the outdoors. Unfortunately, today you can’t be sure that what you’re scooping up isn’t going to bite you back.

Because of changes in drinking water regulations, the roadside springs once so prevalent are capped, and drinking out of a brook is like a round of Russian roulette. Water filters of all shapes, sizes, and prices have been the rule now for about 10 years. They provide a margin of safety and assurance, but they require some work.

Enter the SteriPEN. Fill your one-liter water bottle, insert the tip of SteriPEN, push the button, and the battery-operated ultraviolet light turns on and delivers the appropriate dose duration and then shuts off. All you need do is gently agitate the bottle while the light is shining. For a liter that’s about 90 seconds. Voila! Safe drinking water!

The instrument is not intended for murky water. A pre-filter soon will be sold to help eliminate sediment you might scoop up when gathering water.

Maiden said he got the idea for SteriPEN as an extension of doing some contract work in the mid-1990s with the Department of Energy, creating a system to heat fluids with solar energy. About the same time folks at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., were looking to use solar energy, in particular UV light, to create a reactive agent that would oxidize carbon and could be used to break down spilled fuels.

His thoughts turned to creating UV light through photovoltaics and then to water treatment in remote areas, Maiden said. Up to then, larger treatment facilities used stationary light sources of varying intensity past which the water flowed. The idea of dipping a lamp into water and disinfecting it was a daydream he had while driving down the road one day, he said. The thing that matters most in disinfecting water is the cumulative dose of UV that the water receives. It doesn’t matter if the water is moving past the light or the light is in a container of water.

Maiden said testing at the University of Maine supported his concept of prototypes. He received help miniaturizing the components, had his manufacturing done “off shore,” and in 2000 his first units hit the market at $230 apiece. Time Magazine picked it as the invention of the year in 2002, and R.E.I. has been selling it for more than three years.

Here’s what testing has shown: SteriPEN destroys giardia and cryptosporidium, kills 99.9999 percent of bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli, eliminates more than 99.99 percent of viruses such as hepatitis and poliovirus, and that it meets the U.S. EPA Guide Standard and Protocol for testing microbiological water purifiers. The company says SteriPEN will destroy the following micro-organisms: bacillus anthracis, corynebacterium diphtheriae, dysentary bacilli (diarrhea), escherichia coli (diarrhea), Legionella pneumophilia, mycobacterium tuberculosis, pseudomonas aeruginosa, salmonella (food poisoning), salmonella paratyphi (enteric fever), salmonella typhosa (typhoid fever), shigella dysentariae (dysentery), shigella flexneri (dysentery), staphylococcus epidermidis, streptococcus faecaelis, vibro commo (cholera), bacteriophage (E. coli), hepatitis, influenza, poliovirus (poliomyelitis), and baker’s yeast.

Whew!

What’s next? Maiden said he’s looking into using light emitting diodes as a UV light source. They are a lot less expensive, more durable, and last a long time. And the beauty is that work on creating the LEDs that produce UV light is ongoing by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the central research and development organization for the Department of Defense.

The U.S. Marine Corps is interested in an idea that would bring the LED/UV disinfectant idea into the realm of putting the technology into the drinking tube of a hydration system such as the Camel Back.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see that concept become a reality. Keep an eye out for it.

For more information on SteriPEN write to Hydro-Photon Inc., 262 Ellsworth Road, P.O. Box 675, Blue Hill 04614 or check out their Web site at www.steripen.com.

Jeff Strout can be reached at 990-8202 or by e-mail at jstrout@bangordailynews.net.