dearlydeerling:wayfaringmd:webofgoodnews:How a shampoo bottle is saving young livesON HIS first nigh
dearlydeerling:wayfaringmd:webofgoodnews:How a shampoo bottle is saving young livesON HIS first night as a trainee paediatrician in Sylhet, Bangladesh, Mohamad Chisti (pictured above) watched three children die of pneumonia. Oxygen was being delivered to them, through a face mask or via tubes placed near their nostrils, using what is called a basic “low-flow” technique which followed World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines for low-income countries. But it was clearly failing. He decided to find a better way.Read moreWe need more innovators like this man. His invention was inspired by something he saw while visiting Australia. On this trip he was introduced to a type of ventilator called a bubble-CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure), which is employed to help premature babies breathe. It channels the infant’s exhaled breath through a tube that has its far end immersed in water. The exhaled breath emerges from the tube as bubbles, and the process of bubble formation causes oscillations of pressure in the air in the tube. These feed back into the child’s lungs. That improves the exchange of gases in the alveoli and also increases the lungs’ volume. Both make breathing easier.At about $6,000, standard bubble-CPAPs are cheaper than conventional ventilators. But that is still too much for many poor-country hospitals. However, after a second piece of serendipitous inspiration, when he picked up a discarded shampoo bottle that contained leftover bubbles, Dr Chisti realised he could probably lash together something that did the same job. Which he did, using an oxygen supply (which is, in any case, needed for the low-flow oxygen delivery method), some tubing and a plastic bottle filled with water. And it worked.In 2015 he and his colleagues published the results of a trial that they had conducted in the institution where he practises, the Dhaka Hospital of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research. This showed that the method had potential. The hospital now deploys it routinely and the number of children who die there from pneumonia has fallen by three-quarters. That means the survival rate in the Dhaka Hospital is today almost on a par with that of children treated in rich-world facilities, using conventional ventilators. -- source link