Seeds and fruit of the M. oleifera, ready for cooking. In some parts of South Asia it is known as saragwa and in Malayalam language as Murunggi.
Considered to be one of the world’s most useful trees, seeds from the Moringa oleifera tree (known in Hausa as Zogale), can produce a 90.00% to 99.99% bacterial reduction in previously untreated water.
A low-cost water purification technique published in Current Protocols in Microbiology said it could help drastically reduce the incidence of waterborne disease in the developing world.
“Moringa oleifera is a vegetable tree which is grown in Africa, Central and South America, the Indian subcontinent, and South East Asia.
A billion people across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are estimated to rely on untreated surface water sources for their daily water needs. Michael Lea, a Current Protocols author, and a researcher at Clearinghouse, a Canadian organisation dedicated to investigating and implementing low-cost water purification technologies, believes the Moringa oleifera tree could go a long way to providing a solution.
Lea said “Not only is it drought resistant, it also yields cooking and lighting oil, soil fertilizer, as well as highly nutritious food in the form of its pods, leaves, seeds and flowers. Perhaps most importantly, its seeds can be used to purify drinking water at virtually no cost.”
Moringa tree seeds, when crushed into powder, can be used as a water-soluble extract in suspension, resulting in an effective natural clarification agent for highly turbid and untreated pathogenic surface water. As well as improving drinkability, this technique reduces water turbidity (cloudiness) making the result aesthetically as well as microbiologically more acceptable for human consumption.