Sunday, January 29, 2012

AMSA- Amer. Medical Student Association

Home - AMSA UW

Questions for Pre Meds answered.

Happy hunting

Water and Power from Salt Water

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiKa4nOkHLw&feature=youtube_gdata_player

EKG Basics textbook: best

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0135002389/ref=aw_cr_item_title?qid=1327837790&sr=8-1-spell

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Anti-Aging Bacteria Testing : Bacillius F

Interesting article about anti-aging bacteria:  Bacillius F


A hardy type of bacteria recently discovered in the permafrost of Siberia could help slow down the aging process, Russian scientists claimed on Tuesday.
 
The species of bacteria — given the name Bacillius F — was found in laboratory tests to have shown signs of slowing down the process of aging on mice, theRussian Academy of Sciences said.
 
The Siberian branch of the RAN said Bacillius F lags 3 million years behind similar bacteria in evolutionary terms, according to the characteristics of proteins and some other factors.
 
"Taking into consideration the unusual living environment, one can only marvel at the resilience of these bacteria," it said.
 
It added that the organisms found in Russia's northern region of Yakutia — home to the coldest inhabited area on the planet — reproduce at just 5 degrees Celsius.
 
"We just thought: Since the bacteria were found in the permafrost where they were successfully preserved they will possibly have mechanisms of retaining viability," added Nadezhda Mironova, senior research scientist at the Institute of Chemical Biology and Fundamental Medicine of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
 
"This is what happened," she was quoted as saying.
 
Injections of the bacteria into mice have helped boost the natural defenses of the animals as they grew older.
 
"Bacillius F injections have favourably affected the quality of being of the aging animals," the Russian scientists said.
 
"First and foremost, this concerns immunity and the speed of its activation."
 
Experiments have shown that metabolism in the tested mice have increased by 20 to 30 percent, the scientists said, adding that the bacterium may also reduce instances of senile blindness but not the emergence of tumors.
 
The Russian Academy of Sciences did not say how many mice were tested, adding more animals were needed for the experiments to be more reliable. The mice from a test group lived longer than those in a control group however, it said, calling the results "impressive."

Apple's Digital Textbooks Format that will destroy printed textbook publishing

Cheap Vaccine Partnerships across borders

The Gates Foundation gathered together partners in making cheap vaccines for Africa.
The partnership involved:

The success of the campaign also depended upon an innovative vaccine development model spanning four continents. Partners in this effort ranged from the Meningitis Vaccine Project, to funders like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to the Serum Institute of India Ltd., which committed to making the vaccine for less than $0.50 (U.S.) per dose. Finally, critical to the rollout was the GAVI Alliance, which supports the introduction of vaccines in the developing world.

International Center for Diarrheal Research - Bangladesh

Bill and Melinda Gates are working with this center:
   http://www.icddrb.org/

Doctors Without Borders: USA President

Bicycle Water Pruifier

WHO: country profiles

Global Development News: The Guardian (UK)

Global Alert and Response (China) from WHO

Global Alert and Response (China) from WHO:
   http://www.who.int/csr/don/archive/country/chn/en/

Sana: Mobile Phone Medicine in Poor Countries

http://project.vodafone-us.com/past-competitions/2010-competition/2010-winners/sana/


Sana (formerly MocaMobile)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sana is a multidisciplinary group based out of MIT with a mission to revolutionize healthcare delivery in rural and undeserved areas. Sana has developed an innovative open source platform that allows mobile phones to capture and send data for an electronic medical record and links community health workers with physicians for real-time decision support.
Sana also will receive the mHealth Alliance Award—with benefits totaling $50,000, including participation in Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society’sGlobal Social Benefit Incubator Program (GSBI™), a highly competitive program that connects innovators with a Silicon Valley support network and provides instruction on how to achieve maximum sustainability and impact in social enterprises.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Eye Exam on your Cell Phone

Eye Exam on your Cell Phone
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=N4xbKtL3o_o

David Laggis: The End of Illness-Book


David Laggis: The End of Illness-Book


by Kit Frymier on Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 11:52pm

David Laggis- (Lance Armstrong and Steve Job's doctor)
    The End of Illness-Book
        http://www.amazon.com/End-Illness-David-B-Agus/dp/1451610173

Genetic Testing for Disease:
    http://www.navigenics.com/

Negative Pressure "Wound Pump" can triple the healing rate for patients

https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/2011/11/13/the_wound_pump_can_triple_patients_healing_rate.html

The Wound Pump can triple patients' healing rate
Filed under: Health
The Wound Pump in a field test in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Photo courtesy of Danielle Zurovcik
This innovation is one of ourPromising Prototypes of IEEE's Global Humanitarian Technology Conference in Seattle Oct. 30 - Nov 1. For more in the series, please see below.
With little more than off-the-shelf bellows pump, a rubber stopper and some surgical tubing, a team from MIT made a stand-in for a $25,000 medical device. In hospitals, negative-pressure wound therapy machines apply constant suction to wounds such as cuts, diabetic ulcers, burns and traumatic injuries. The suction stimulates healing three times faster or more, with less scar tissue. As unwieldy, expensive and power-hungry as the machines are, however, they are not available in many developing world medical centers. Not to mention emergency medicine or military battlefields.
The Wound Pump, based on a hand-operated bellows pump, is a simplified alternative to the machine. Danielle Zurovcik and a team at MIT developed the device to conform to low costs, portability and operation without electricity. It needs only 10 seconds of hand pumping every two or three days to maintain negative pressure. It's not a poor substitute for the more expensive machines, either. The MIT team's tests show that it compares in performance.
The Wound Pump can be the first such device available in many developing world clinics, Zurovcik tells E4C. “It can help heal potentially life threatening wounds in low resource settings,” Zurovcik says.
It's able to maintain pressure over several days because it's mostly air tight. Conventional negative pressure machines leak air during suction, but they can compensate by drawing power to run their pumps. The Wound Pump, on the other hand, is incredibly power efficient.
Local build and repair is important to the Wound Pump's developers. "Local manufacturing will provide economic benefits to the local communities and ensure equal access to this wound-healing technology for all patients, says Danielle Zurovcik, an MIT PhD candidate working on the device.
Now the device is in clinical trials. One of the goals is to continue to simplify its use to reduce the amount of training that practitioners will need to operate it.

High Capacity Water Purifier for poor countries: from Dean Kamen - famous inventor of Segway



http://www.esquire.com/features/dean-kamen-1208-3


Segway creator unveils his next act
Inventor Dean Kamen wants to put entrepreneurs to work bringing water and electricity to the world's poor.
By Erick Schonfeld, Business 2.0 Magazine editor-at-large

San Francisco (Business 2.0) - Dean Kamen, the engineer who invented the Segway, is puzzling over a new equation these days. An estimated 1.1 billion people in the world don't have access to clean drinking water, and an estimated 1.6 billion don't have electricity. Those figures add up to a big problem for the world—and an equally big opportunity for entrepreneurs.
To solve the problem, he's invented two devices, each about the size of a washing machine that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages.
"Eighty percent of all the diseases you could name would be wiped out if you just gave people clean water," says Kamen. "The water purifier makes 1,000 liters of clean water a day, and we don't care what goes into it. And the power generator makes a kilowatt off of anything that burns."
Light in the darkness
Kamen is not alone in his quest. He's been joined by Iqbal Quadir, the founder of Grameen Phone, the largest cell phone company in Bangladesh. Last year, Quadir took prototypes of Kamen's power machines to two villages in his home country for a six-month field trial. That trial, which ended last September, sold Quadir on the technology.
So much so in fact that Quadir's startup, Cambridge, Mass.-based Emergence Energy, is negotiating with Kamen's Deka Research and Development to license the technology. Quadir then hopes to raise $30 million in venture capital to start producing the power machines. (With the exception of the Segway, which Kamen's own company sold, Kamen has typically licensed his inventions to others.)
The electric generator is powered by an easily-obtained local fuel: cow dung. Each machine continuously outputs a kilowatt of electricity. That may not sound like much, but it is enough to light 70 energy-efficient bulbs. As Kamen puts it, "If you judiciously use a kilowatt, each villager can have a nighttime."
A satellite picture of the earth at night shows swaths of darkness across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. For the people living there, a simple light bulb would mean an extension of both their productivity and their leisure times.
Entrepreneurial power
The real invention here, though, may be the economic model that Kamen and Quadir hope to use to distribute the machines. It is fashioned after Grameen Phone's business, where village entrepreneurs (mostly women) are given micro-loans to purchase a cell phone and service. The women, in turn, charge other villagers to make calls.
"We have 200,000 rural entrepreneurs who are selling telephone services in their communities," notes Quadir. "The vision is to replicate that with electricity."
During the test in Bangladesh, Kamen's Stirling machines created three entrepreneurs in each village: one to run the machine and sell the electricity, one to collect dung from local farmers and sell it to the first entrepreneur, and a third to lease out light bulbs (and presumably, in the future, other appliances) to the villagers.
Kamen thinks the same approach can work with his water-cleaning machine, which he calls the Slingshot. While the Slingshot wasn't part of Quadir's trial in Bangladesh, Kamen thinks it can be distributed the same way. "In the 21st century, water will be delivered by an entrepreneur," he predicts.
The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water – even raw sewage -- and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it. It then shoots the remaining sludge back out a plastic tube. Kamen thinks it could be paired with the power machine and run off the other machine's waste heat.
Compared to building big power and water plants, Kamen's approach has the virtue of simplicity. He even created an instruction sheet to go with each Slingshot. It contains one step: Just add water, any water. Step two might be: add an entrepreneur.
"Not required are engineers, pipelines, epidemiologists, or microbiologists," says Kamen. "You don't need any -ologists. You don't need any building permits, bribery, or bureaucracies."
The price of freedom
Still, even if some of the technical challenges have been solved ("I know the technology works and I'd fall on my sword to prove it," insists Kamen), the economic challenges still loom.
Kamen's goal is to produce machines that cost $1,000 to $2,000 each. That's a far cry from the $100,000 that each hand-machined prototype cost to build.
Quadir is going to try and see if the machines can be produced economically by a factory in Bangladesh. If the numbers work out, not only does he think that distributing them in a decentralized fashion will be good business -- he also thinks it will be good public policy. Instead of putting up a 500-megawatt power plant in a developing country, he argues, it would be much better to place 500,000 one-kilowatt power plants in villages all over the place, because then you would create 500,000 entrepreneurs.
"Isn't that better for democracy?" Quadir asks. "We see a shortage of democracy in the world, and we are surprised. If you strengthen the economic hands of people, you will foster real democracy."
Lights, water, freedom. Now that's entrepreneurial.

Tuberculosis Detection using a Rats Nose

Tuberculosis detection using a Rats Nose

https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/2011/12/07/rats_are_on_the_front_lines_of_the_tuberculosis_fight.html


Rats are on the front lines of the tuberculosis fight
Filed under: HealthGeneral
Rats patter along a run pocked with holes and sniff the sputum samples in the cavities below. When they detect tuberculosis in the mucous, they pause and sometimes scratch at the ground. Photo by Stuart Franklin
Predictably, the rats at APOPO have an image problem. At health centers in Tanzania, the organization with a Belgian acronym has trained African giant pouched rats to sniff out tuberculosis in mucous samples. Already, the rodents have ferreted out 2300 cases of tuberculosis that had slipped the attention of technicians examining the sputum with microscopes. Combined studies of samples from more than 20,000 patients at eight hospitals suggest that the rats can improve tuberculosis detection by 43 percent. They are many times faster than people and as cheap or cheaper than any other proven method of analysis.
For their cost, their efficacy and their availability in sub-Saharan Africa, these animals may be a uniquely appropriate technology. They are suited to clinics and other work, from landmine detection to patrols for illegal drugs and tobacco. If only they can shake their ratty reputations.
“We still face challenges in the general acceptance of our technique,” Bart Weetjens, who heads APOPO, told E4C. “A great deal of that is the general perception people have about rats.”
“Last year we were responsible for 10% of all cases of tuberculosis detected in capital of Tanzania, but we haven't been mentioned in television reports. They consider it a marginal thing, but our impact is considerable,” Weetjens says.
Photo by Sylvain Piraux
Meet the pouched rat
The rats in question are endemic to sub-Saharan Africa. Taxonomically, these are not true rats, but a related species unique to Africa (and Madagascar). They are eminently trainable – thishouse pet on YouTube is actually toilet-trained – and they live long enough to make training worthwhile. They live for about eight years, more than twice as long as the home-invading species that we love to hate. They also grow up to three feet (90cm) long nose-to-tail. Tallying food, living space and veterinary bills, the rats are cheap. They cost much less in upkeep than many other service animals, especially dogs.
The “pouched” part of their name refers to cheek pouches where they can store food. Importantly for tuberculosis patients, wild pouched rats also bury food underground to save it against leaner months. To find their storehouses once they're buried, the rats rely on a refined sense of smell.
The bomb squad Weetjens drew on his childhood experience raising pet rats to surmise that the pouched rats could solve the landmine problem in Africa. As fur balls go, rats are cute pets, something most of us miss because of their image problem. They also have sharp noses and they'll do a lot for a treat, Weetjens knew. He figured he could train them to sniff TNT. Weetjens founded APOPO, short for Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende ProductOntwikkeling, which, in Dutch means Landmine Detection Product Development.
Photo by Xavier Rossi
In the late 1990s, he began training rats in Belgium. Then, in 2000, he moved the operation to Morogoro, Tanzania, and forged partnerships with the Sokoine University of Agriculture and the Tanzanian People’s Defense Force. Within four years, APOPO had won accreditation with the International Mine Action Standards and in 2006 the rats were at work clearing suspected mine fields in Tanzania's southern neighbor, Mozambique. Mines are a legacy from Mozambique's two civil wars, and they render swathes of the country's land unusable for farming or other development.
Rats in harnesses tethered to lines scurry across the suspected mine fields sniffing for TNT. If they smell something suspicious, they'll pause for five seconds and often scratch at the ground, signaling to their handlers. Then they'll run back for a banana or fruit puree while people with metal detectors confirm the find. With that method, APOPO's teams have cleared more than 600 acres (2.5 million square meters) of land in Mozambique and found more than 1000 mines and thousands of other explosive devices that could cause harm.
Two rats with their handlers can clear more than 3000 square feet (300 square meters) of land in one hour, while two people with metal detectors might spend two days covering that area. And they work for about half of the cost: The international average cost of demining is $2 for 10 square feet (1 square meter), but the rats can do the same area for an average cost of $1.10.
It is not known if the rats have a better sense of smell than bomb-detecting dogs, but they are cheaper. Another advantage they have over dogs is that they don't bond to one particular handler. APOPO can train rats in Tanzania and ship them to Mozambique or Thailand, where the organization is beginning mine detection work, or anywhere else. When they arrive, the animals will work with unfamiliar handlers as long as the people use familiar techniques.
For many of the same reasons that the rats excel at mine detection, they can also perform well in clinics. While fielding its bomb sniffers, APOPO had also begun training rats to find tuberculosis.
One-third of the world is infected
One-third of the world has tuberculosis, the World Health Organization reports, but the disease-causing microbes are dormant in most people. The bacilli become active in up to 10 percent of those infected, and a much higher percentage of people who are also infected with HIV. The two diseases often go hand in hand.
Tuberculosis killed 1.7 million people in 2009, and Africa is the hardest hit, with 30 percent of the world's new cases in 2008 and 450 people infected per 100,000. South-East Asia had 35 percent of the world's new cases in that year, but with Africa's lower population, its rate was much higher at 340 people per 100,000, compared to 180 people per 100,000 in South-East Asia.
Photo courtesy of APOPO
Missed cases
To detect the disease, Tanzanian technicians examine patients' mucous samples under microscope. In one day, one person can examine about 40 samples.
Trained rats could do it much faster, Weetjens proposed. To test the theory, he and teams of researchers conducted studies in eight Tanzanian hospitals. They ran groups of eight, nine or ten rats past more than 22,000 sputum samples, each of which had already been under a microscope. The rats found more than 700 additional cases that had gone undetected by microscopy, the researchers reported in the PanAfrican Medical Journal in July.
Using rats as a second line of analysis boosted the detection rate by 43 percent, the researchers found. That's important, Weetjens points out, not only for the infected patients, but for also for anyone who spends time with them. Each untreated person with active tuberculosis infects an average of 10-15 people per year, the WHO estimates.
Rats to the rescue
With all of their success, the rats have yet to win over hearts and minds.
“For our tuberculosis application, it has been more difficult to convince the medical establishment, than it was to convince the mine action community,” Weetjens says.
He and APOPO have taken the role of the rats' public relations firm, trying to shift public perception to the idea that the animals are not vermin but rather they are life savers. To that end, they call their animals HeroRATS. APOPO set up HeroRAT “adoption” programs for donors to finance the training and upkeep of a rat. 
Hero Rats: Landmine and tuberculosis detectors. By The Economist
Rats in the futureWith help from APOPO and the other demining crews in Mozambique, the country is on track for full demining by 2014. The rats have already begun work in Thailand and the program is gaining traction with potential worldwide. In health clinics, the future is not so clear. Casting the rodents as heroes has been a hard sell for a skeptical Tanzanian health department. But the studies are powerful convincers. 
"With a new technology like this one, the public health community is reluctant and will dwell on everything that is wrong," Weetjens says. However, "In the end, we will win this game because our data are quite compelling."
How E4C can helpAPOPO makes its designs in house, and there's a lot of engineering involved, Weetjens says. That's where our community can contribute. One of the challenges the clinics face now is how to transport and store sputum samples. Now, they are transported in refrigerated boxes and stored in freezers at the clinics. But power is intermittent. Proposals include freeze drying and solar-powered refrigerators, but, as always, the cost is the limiting factor.
We can also contribute with donations. See APOPO's site for more information.