Salad spinner the latest innovation in anemia
Provided by: QMI
Written by: QMI Agency
May. 3, 2010
Two Texas university students are hoping their small changes to a salad spinner will help save lives.
Rice University students Lila Kerr and Lauren Theis modified the device, normally used to dry lettuce, so it acts as a centrifuge to rapidly rotate blood to separate heavier red blood cells and lighter plasma. By doing so, health-care workers can determine if a patient is anemic.
The students say their design, which uses a pump salad spinner and is called the Sally Centrifuge, has three big advantages.
For starters, it requires no electricity. Instead, it takes about 10 minutes of pumping to get similar results to what an electrical device called the ZIPocrit would produce in about five minutes.
“We’ve pumped it for 20 minutes with no problem,” Theis said. “Ten minutes is a breeze.”
As well, they say the salad spinner can hold up to 30 tubes of blood at a time, compared to the ZIPocrit, which can only hold four.
A third benefit is that the plastic spinner can take a little abuse.
“It’s all plastic and pretty durable,” Kerr said. “We haven’t brought it overseas yet, of course, but we’ve trekked it back and forth across campus in our backpacks and grocery bags and it’s held up fine.”
Kerr will be taking the spinner to Ecuador later this month for field research with the help of an organization called Beyond Traditional Borders. Theis will be heading to Swaziland in early June and a third team will take a spinner to Malawi in June.
“The students really did an amazing job of taking very simple, low-cost materials and creating a device their research shows correlates nicely with hematocrit levels in the blood,” said engineering professor Maria Oden.
“Many of the patients seen in developing world clinics are anemic, and it’s a severe health problem. Being able to diagnose it with no power, with a device that’s extremely lightweight, is very valuable.”
Anil K Gupta
