Deborah DeGroot
founder, research, and Mission to Better Health in Traverse City, Michigan
I am the founder of WWS4Life, which was born out of the need for more comfortable respiratory equipment.
Our mission is to be the first nonprofit NIOSH manufacturer focused on serving vulnerable communities exposed to noxious fumes and harmful particulates by providing accessible, public-sponsored, or donated measures with cutting-edge U.S. Patent #11,491,355-B1, novel safety respiratory protections to reduce avoidable respiratory disease.
We are working to fund creative solutions to tackle the devastating effects of uncomfortable safety.
Please consider helping us move this mission forward to make a real impact by bringing to market safety that can be worn by all and empowering users to stop avoidable respiratory disease through better comfort.
How did this become possible?
My husband serendipitously figured out a way to make all respirators safer and more comfortable.
We both experienced the challenges to make personal protective equipment an essential tool in our health journey. I married Mark Millard in 1998, and we worked together to build our home from the ground up. Occasionally, we used half-face respirators, but only when we felt it was highly toxic or when we could hardly breathe without our PPE, such as when we sprayed paint in the interior of our home or applied toxic varnishes or urethanes to our flooring. However, when it came to exposure to poisons outside, we never used protection because of the discomfort. We both realized the exposure to toxins and particulates outside was harmful, but just hoped for the best by choosing the wind as our only protection. The thought of using PPE was so overwhelmingly uncomfortable that we decided to harm ourselves and deal with our future disease as a consolation prize for working hard without protection.
The day he handed me his invented solution to make his standard half-face respirator comfortable and allow him to wear his protection no matter how long it took, I knew this adaptation to standard masks and respirators had to reach the world.
We are a team working towards developing a strategy for the first and only nonprofit NIOSH manufacturer and distributor, along with the first nonprofit institute developing the next generation of safety to move the industry to do better safety now.
We want to build a coalition to invest in the Global Respiratory Advocates Institute's ability to be part of the initial development of a new pipeline of “generic” better safety.