Arsenic poisoning and viruses are two of the most widespread water-related problems in the world. A new generation of adsorption and ion exchange materials has been developed in our laboratory. These fibers offer orders of magnitude increase in capacity and kinetics over conventional technology. Additionally, the fibers can be manufactured from a number of precursor materials, formed on a variety of substrates due to a unique low temperature process, and can be tailored for high adsorption capacity, adsorption kinetics and selectivity. We have optimized and scaled up a low-cost system consisting of iron oxide supported on glass fiber substrates which effectively removes the As3+ and As5+ from groundwater (below 1ppb). Similarly, MS2 virus was indicated to well below the USEPA standards.