[News release] E-skin and pocket-sized diagnostic machines give patients the power back

E-skin and pocket-sized diagnostic machines give patients the power back.

From the May 2015 Elsevier news release 

New bio-sensing technologies give us cheap, fast and convenient health data

Amsterdam, May 12, 2015

Wearable E-skin that can measure heart rate and blood pressure, and paper diagnostic machines the size of a credit card that can give instant readings on blood and saliva samples are two new bio-sensing technologies presented at Elsevier’s 4th International Conference on Bio-Sensing Technology in Lisbon, Portugal on 12 May 2015.

Bio-sensors can detect and analyze data to give patients information on their heart rate and blood pressure, blood sugar and hormone levels, and even test whether they are infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This detection technology is a step forward in personal medicine, giving patients real-time information about how their bodies are functioning and suggesting the most suitable treatments.

Professor Anthony Turner, Head of the Biosensors & Bioelectronics Centre at Linköping University, Sweden, has developed an instrument the size of a credit card that can analyse blood and saliva samples. It is simple to use: you switch it on by pressing a button, then apply your sample to a circle in the bottom right corner and wait for a digital reading to be displayed and even sent to your mobile phone.

The whole instrument is printed on the card using a screen-printing technique. It could be used to monitor diabetes, kidney disease and heart disease, or to detect cancer. This, says Professor Turner, could turn a 2500-year-old paradigm on its head and put the power in the patient’s hands.

…

This means they have the potential to provide patients and doctors in developing countries with accessible, affordable medical tests. For example, the printed card could be made part of the packaging of antibiotics, helping determine which antibiotic would be best to treat a patient’s infection.

Such printable devices could also be worn like plasters or contact lenses, transmitting information to mobile phones. Similarly, e-skin devices are also designed to be wearable and portable, and to transmit data about how a patient’s body is functioning.

Professor Ting Zhang, from Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, is presenting a new kind of e-skin at the Conference. E-skin is developed based on flexible electronic technology and nanotechnology; because of its unique ability to detect tiny changes in pressure, e-skin can be used to monitor blood pressure, heart rate and wrist pulse.

….

Bio-sensing technologies are gaining momentum in areas like health, the environment and security. The conference brings together leaders from industry and academia to exchange and share their experiences, present research results, explore collaborations and spark new ideas, with the aim of developing new projects and exploiting new technology for bio-sensing applications.

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Presentation details:
“The Paper Potentiostat” by Professor Anthony Turner and “Flexible Nanoelectronic Skin for Wearable/attachable Health Applications” by Professor Ting Zhang are being presented on 12 May 2015 at Elsevier’s 4th International Conference on Bio-Sensing Technology in Lisbon, Portugal.

 For more information, contact Elsevier’s Newsroom at newsroom@elsevier.com or +31 20 4853564.

About the 4th International Conference on Bio-Sensing Technology
Following the success of the first 3 conferences, the 4th International Conference on Bio-Sensing Technology will continue to bring together leaders from industry and academia to exchange and share their experiences, present research results, explore collaborations and to spark new ideas, with the aim of developing new projects and exploiting new technology for bio-sensing applications. www.biosensingconference.com.

For more information go to: Elsevier Connect
http://www.elsevier.com/connect/how-printable-testing-kits-could-turn-healthcare-upside-down

– See more at: http://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/research-and-journals/e-skin-and-pocket-sized-diagnostic-machines-give-patients-the-power-back#sthash.QxvjdTSs.dpuf

Hard Questions For Medical Humanitarian Organizations Provoked By Adverse Effects Of Mining Industry

 

Médecins Sans Frontières logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

From the 30 August 2012 article at Medical News Today

 

Increasingly humanitarian organizations will find themselves responding to health emergencies provoked by the adverse effects of mining and other extractive industries, setting up a potential clash to do with the core principles and values at the heart of humanitarian medicine, writes Philippe Calain from the humanitarian medical organization, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), in this week’s PLOS Medicine.

“A pragmatic approach of engagement with the corporate sector for the delivery of aid, or an implicit support to mainstream development agendas could compromise the legitimacy of humanitarian medicine,” argues Calain. He continues, “A principled understanding of humanitarian medicine entails selfless moral commitments that are incompatible with the for-profit objectives of corporate industries.”

Drawing on MSF’s experience responding to the “worst lead poisoning epidemic in modern history” resulting from artisanal gold mining in Nigeria’s Zamfara state, Calain explores the pitfalls, difficult alliances, and challenges medical humanitarian organizations must navigate in confronting the dire health consequences resulting from extractive industries, whether informal, illegal, or sanctioned.

He argues that, in developing countries, extractive industries (including ore mineral mining and oil extraction) have far reaching consequences on health through environmental pollution, communicable diseases, violence, destitution, and compromised food security. While humanitarian organisations might be called to intervene in areas occupied by the extractive sector, Calain argues that oil and mineral exploitation reveals a fundamental clash of values between humanitarianism, the for-profit sector, and privatised global philanthropy.

Operating in this relatively new terrain for medical humanitarian organizations – outside the traditional humanitarian response to armed conflict, epidemics, and natural disasters – requires a deeper examination of which types of compromises and alliances are acceptable. Responding to these kinds of emergencies, warns Calain, cannot be reduced to the development of medical and technical expertise alone….

 

Related articles

• Adverse effects of mining industry provoke hard questions for medical humanitarian organizations (medicalxpress.com)
• What Is the Relationship of Medical Humanitarian Organisations with Mining and Other Extractive Industries? (zedie.wordpress.com)

 

[Reblog] Maternal Health and the Status of Women

[Reblog]

Maternal Health and the Status of Women

Both globally and domestically, maternal health and the standing of women are inextricably linked. If women do not have the means and access to give birth safely, with trained and educated midwives, physicians and nurses, with appropriate prenatal education and care, it is often indicative of the standing of women in their communities and countries overall. Women’s inequality is also linked to the soaring population growth in developing countries, which will pose a range of new challenges for the next few generations.

Some may point to the United States as an anomaly, citing women’s increasing economic and financial independence, education, and leadership roles in America, while in terms of maternal health rankings, we remain pathetically far down the line for our resources (49 other countries are safer places to give birth than the U.S. – despite us spending more money on healthcare than anywhere else). Of course, the recent and incessant attacks on allowing women to access credible, accurate, up-to-date and comprehensive sexual and reproductive health education and services makes this statistic not entirely…surprising, shall we say.

So, I found the incredibly detailed and visually impressive infographic by the National Post, pulled from spectacular data and research done by Save the Children to be particularly fascinating. What they did was combine information on the health, economic, and education status of women to create overall rankings of the best and worst countries for women, splitting the countries into categories of more developed, less developed, and least developed, and the countries were ranked in relation to the other countries in their category (the divisions were based on the 2008 United Nations Population Division’s World Population Prospects, which most recently no longer classified based on development standing). While these divisions and the rankings can certainly be contentious and may incite some disagreement (nothing unusual there, these kind of rankings usually are), I thought the results were interesting. Some highlights – Norway is first, Somalia is last. The United States was 19th, and Canada was 17th (Estonia fell in between us and the Great White North) in the most developed. Israel is first in the less developed category, and Bhutan is first in the least developed category. The full report with data from Save the Children is also available, if you want to learn more about the information combined to make this image. Take a look:

[larger image at http://larkincallaghan.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/best-and-worst-places-to-be-a-woman.jpg]

A Woman’s Place – Courtesy of the National Post

One thing that I thought was particularly great was that the researchers combined women’s health and children’s heath data to create rankings specific to being a mother, when that category is sometimes only assessed based on access to reproductive care.The specific rankings of maternal health highlights largely mimics the overall standing of women, as seen here – Norway is number one, again, and Niger falls into last place:

Mother’s Index, Courtesy of Save the Children

I think these images and graphs are particularly moving given one of the top health stories coming out of the New York Times today, which showed that a recent Johns Hopkins study indicated meeting the contraception needs of women in developing countries could reduce maternal mortality (and thereby increase the standing of women in many of the nations doing poorly in the above ranking) globally by a third. When looking at the countries in the infographic that have low rates of using modern contraception and the correlation between that and their ranking in terms of status of women, it’s not surprising what the JH researchers found. Many of the countries farther down in the rankings have rates below 50%, and for those countries filling the bottom 25 slots, none of them even reach a rate that is a third of the population in terms of contraceptive use – which of course in most cases has to do with availability, not choice. Wonderfully, the Gates Foundation yesterday announced that they would be donating $1 billion to increase the access to contraceptives in developing countries.

Also of note, and in relation to maternal and newborn health, is a new study recently published by Mailman researchers that showed PEPFAR funded programs in sub-Saharan Africa increased access to healthcare facilities for women (particularly important for this region, as 50% of maternal deaths occur there), thereby increasing the number of births occurring in these facilities – reducing the avoidable (and sometimes inevitable) complications from labor and delivery, decreasing the chance of infection and increasing treatment if contracted. This has clear implications for children as well (and why I think this study relates to the National Post infographic and the NY Times article), since newborns are also able to be assessed by trained healthcare workers and potentially life-threatening conditions averted – including HIV, if the newborns have HIV+ mothers and need early anti-retroviral treatment and a relationship with a healthcare worker and system. And it goes without saying that if a new mother is struggling with post-delivery healthcare issues, including abscesses and fistulas, or was dealing with a high-risk pre-labor condition like preeclampsia, the child will have an increasingly difficult early life, perhaps even a motherless one.

Related articles

• The Best And Worst Places In The World To Be A Woman (fastcoexist.com)
• Maternal health: India likely to miss milennium goals, says UN (thehindu.com)
• Contraceptive Use Averts 272,000 Maternal Deaths Worldwide (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• Mothers lose out (thehindu.com)
• 100,000 Women’s Lives Could Be Saved By Expanded Access To Contraception (thinkprogress.org)
• Rich countries pledge $2.6bn for family planning in global south (guardian.co.uk)
• Melinda Gates challenges Vatican by vowing to improve contraception (guardian.co.uk)
• Fulfilling Contraception Needs Could Lower Maternal Mortality Drastically, Study Says (nytimes.com)
• Maternal Mortality Rates Could Tank If We Meet Contraception Needs in Developing Countries [Contraception] (jezebel.com)

A Comprehensive Framework for Human Resources for Health System Development in Fragile and Post-Conflict States

From the report at Plos Medicine

Summary Points

• Responding to the global human resource crisis requires systems thinking if a more comprehensive approach to human resource management and development is to be achieved.
• We present a comprehensive and visible framework for human resource system development. This has been derived from the lessons learned in supporting human resource system development in three fragile and post-conflict health systems in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Cambodia.
• The efforts of development partners and the government typically concentrate on the “production” and training of health personnel, but this approach neglects other elements and often the necessary linkages between them. While there is potential value in focused forms of support, they will be much less effective, with negative effects on both systems and population health, when they are unbalanced, incomplete, or miss the necessary linkages between them.
• While the “house model” contains elements similar to the World Health Organization HRH Action Framework, some functions are extracted in order to draw more attention to them. Issues such as the legal and regulatory framework, coordination, and monitoring are often neglected. We also place particular emphasis on the linkages among elements by highlighting some core functions of human resource management (production-deployment-retention), or by separating the foundation components (policy and planning, finances, legal) as primarily the responsibility of the government.

From the Background section

Responding to the global crisis in human resources for health (HRH) requires systems thinking if a more comprehensive approach is to be promoted. This differs substantially from the traditional emphasis on pre-service education, in-service training, and personnel management [1]. The elements to be included in a more comprehensive assessment and response to HRH system development need to be derived from experience and evidence from the field, and should be validated into the future in different settings.

In post-conflict situations, large numbers of development partners, including United Nations (UN) agencies, international and local non-government organizations (NGOs), and various others, literally “rush in.” The situation is often characterized by a weak health system, and is complicated by the limited quantity and quality of human resources [2]. New governments and emergent ministries typically have limited capacity to manage all the tasks necessary for reconstruction. ….

Related articles

• Restoring Health Systems In Countries After Conflicts (medicalnewstoday.com)
• A novel analytical framework could help to strengthen health systems in post-conflict countries (eurekalert.org)

New report highlights need for action on health in the aftermath of war

From the 31 December 2011 Eureka News Alert

Issue of noncommunicable diseases in post-conflict countries must be addressed

Countries recovering from war are at risk of being left to their own devices in tackling non communicable diseases, leaving an “open door” for exploitation by alcohol, tobacco and food companies, health experts warn.

Writing in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Bayard Roberts and Martin McKee, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and Preeti Patel, of King’s College London, argue that the post-conflict environment risks increases of mental health problems and other NCDs, such as high blood pressure, diabetes and cancer.

After exposure to violent and traumatic events, people may be prone to developing harmful health behaviours, such as excessive drinking and smoking, which exacerbate the problem of NCDs in the long-term. This is why the lack of a strong will from the authorities to restore the health system leaves an open door for commercial ventures to influence health policy to their advantage.

The authors write: “This toxic combination of stress, harmful health behaviours and aggressive marketing by multinational companies in transitional settings requires an effective policy response but often the state has limited capacity to do this.”

Afghanistan has no national policy or strategy towards NCDs and, apart from the European Commission, none of its partners has given priority to introduce and support them. High blood pressure is largely untreated in Iraq, three times as many people die prematurely from NCDs in Libya than from infectious diseases and similar patterns can be found in other countries recovering from conflict.

“This policy vacuum provides an open door for multinational companies to influence policies in ways that undermine efforts to control tobacco and alcohol use or improve unhealthy diets in transitional countries,” the experts say.

Little attention is paid in reconstruction and humanitarian efforts to helping countries emerging from conflict deal with their present or future burden of NCDs – with the topic virtually ignored during the United Nations high-level meeting on NCDs in September 2011. The authors argue that this gap must be filled, pointing out that the post-conflict period can provide an opportunity to completely rewrite strategies and undertake reforms to better address the health needs of a population and lay the foundations for a more efficient health system.

Dr Roberts, a lecturer in the European Centre on Health of Societies in Transition at LSHTM, says: “While great attention is rightly paid to infectious diseases, noncommunicable diseases should also be given attention –especially as the post-conflict environment can provide the perfect breeding ground for unhealthy activities like smoking, drinking and poor diet. We are making the argument that if the authorities do not step up to lead the way in developing policies which will benefit public health, then they leave the route clear for companies to step in and serve their own interests.”

Related articles

• Noncommunicable Disease Epidemic (bigthink.com)
• Conflicts of Interest at the UN Noncommunicable Disease Summit? Bingo. (egmnblog.wordpress.com)
• WHO outlines steps to reduce leading causes of death (cnn.com)
• Scaling up action against noncommunicable diseases will cost about $1.20 per person per year (nextbigfuture.com)
• U.N. adopts declaration on noncommunicable diseases (cnn.com)
• The state of non communicable diseases (jepoirrier.org)

Point-of-Care Diagnostics for the Developing World

This hour long video talk is from the University of Washington.

 

(The Molecular Medicine Program at the University of Washington also provides additional webcasts from their public lectures, seminars and special courses at http://depts.washington.edu/molmed/webcasts/index.html)

From the Web site

People living in the developing world suffer greatly from many illnesses, many of them caused by infectious agents. These people usually do not have access to stable power or clean water, let alone the best diagnostic tools. What can we do to bring the high-tech diagnostic methods used in the developed world to those with fewer resources? Dr. Paul Yager, Professor and Acting Chair in the Department of Bioengineering, explains how microfluidics, a new technology for manipulating small volumes of fluids, is enabling the development of a small portable and inexpensive system for detecting pathogens far from the centralized laboratory. This system could soon have an impact on global health.

Related articles

• A Quick, Cheap Diagnostic Test for HIV and Other Infections (nextbigfuture.com)
• Diagnostic Development Unit Is A Star Trek-Style Sick Bay Bed (psfk.com)