That essay flirts with the critical point of gear maintance, service life and proper usage. Unfortunately, it then walked right on past.

A roughly treated or improperly flushed filter will fail, and like all mechanical systems they wear out. Keeping track of these things is the user's issue, not an issue with the equipment. Don't blame the gear if the user kills themselves accidentally.

They way a filter works is very simple. You have a pore of size X through a material . You suck up a contaminant of size Y. If Y > X, it doesn't stay in the water. Add in activated charcoal or certain epoxy resins, and they absorb certain compounds, trapping them perminantly (OK, you can get it out, but not in the field, and not without doing some really fun chem lab type stuff).

Not much can make it through a 1 micron filter with activated charcoal, that's smaller than protozoa, cysts, spores and cells, and most viruses. So it is something you can carry that is light weight, doesn't require fire or anything other than a catch container, and leaves no signature of it's use. The problem with the sippy-straw filters is that AFAIK, no one has made on with a 1 micron filter.

Boiling is good for MOST but not all biologicals. There are some, that while rare in the wild could be potential biowar agents- a concern if you are thinking in that direction. A filter will pick the spores out. That is a more pressing concern if you are allergic to certain pollens and mold spores, which boiling doesn't always deactivate as the reaction is to a protein.

It will also get a lot of pollutants, most of which are unaffected by 100*C. What the filter doesn't grab, charcoal will, which can't be as easily done with boiling. And I hate to say it, I don't care how far back in the boonies you are, you've got pollution potential. Such as an oil bottle that got lost or was improperly tossed from a logger, or arsenic from an old mine tailing, or any number of things that you really shouldn't drink.

Don't get me wrong. Boiling is good. A 1 micron filter is just better.