Small Paper Chip may help Diagnose Diseases
A small piece of paper, roughly the size of a stamp, may be able to aid in diagnosing some of the worst diseases in foreign countries. Better yet, each paper chip will cost roughly one cent to produce.
George Whitesides, a chemistry professor at Harvard, developed the chip to diagnose diseases like HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, hepatitis, and gastroenteritis. The chip works by placing a single drop of blood on one side. The paper is saturated with a water-repellent comic book ink that transports the blood into different channels on the paper that make it look like branches on a tree. At the end of each channel, there are several layers of treated paper that react with the blood to produce diagnostic colors. In many ways, it’s similar to a home pregnancy test.
The advantage of the paper chip, aside from its low cost, is that it has the ability to diagnose multiple diseases at once, which saves time and allows the doctors to begin treatment much quicker. Whitesides also sees these chips being used in conjunction with mobile phones, which are beginning to be used in much greater numbers in developing countries. With a mobile phone and a paper chip, a doctor could visit someone in a remote village, send a picture of the paper chip to a central diagnostic office, and find out the results in a matter of minutes. They’re also working on specific applications for cell phones that would be able to tell a person what the diagnosis is even if a doctor is not around.
Current medical diagnostic tests are expensive and widely unavailable in poorer developing countries. With a simple and inexpensive tool like this, Mr. Whitesides may have given the poorest parts of the world a very easy solution for diagnosing their most popular diseases. With better tools comes better health and hopefully a severe drop-off of the amount of people whose diseases go untreated for far too long.
To read the original article, please go to http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/25/whitesides.chip/index.html?hpt=C1