An iPhone jury-rigged as a microscope
By sticking a little $8 lens to an iPhone with a piece of double-sided tape, a Canadian doctor has produced a microscope that works reasonably well at diagnosing intestinal worms in children.
The invention, described recently in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, was tested in Tanzania on 200 stool samples from children who had a mix of hookworms, roundworms and giant roundworms.
A 3-millimetre ball lens was taped over the camera lens of an iPhone 4. The zoom was increased to maximum, and slides, with tape atop the samples, were pressed right up to the lens. A pen flashlight shone light through the slide.
This inexpensive arrangement did not match the accuracy of a scan of the same slides with a conventional microscope, but it did about 70 per cent as well.
The iPhone setup correctly detected giant roundworm eggs 81 percent of the time and roundworm eggs 54 per cent of the time. But it was only 14 percent accurate at finding hookworm eggs.
Hookworms produce fewer eggs, and they disintegrate quickly outside the body, said Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at Toronto General Hospital who led the project.
To be useful for field surveys – to decide whether to treat a whole village with deworming medicine, for example — the device would have to be 80 per cent accurate, Bogoch said.
But since smartphone cameras are improving rapidly, that may soon be feasible.
After word of his invention came out, Bogoch was named "Mensch of the Week" by a blog.
"My mom was happy," he said.
Raising awareness about maternal deaths
Last year at this time, Christy Turlington Burns, the model turned maternal-health advocate, asked mothers to celebrate No Mothers Day by not answering their phones or email, even when their children called.
The idea was to bring home what it feels like to suddenly be motherless, because around the world, about 800 women a day die in childbirth, 90 per cent of them from preventable causes.
This year, her charity, Every Mother Counts, has switched to something less controversial: Know Mothers Day. It will ask people to use social media to describe what they value about mothers. Donations will be welcome, but not solicited.
Asked why she had dropped the first idea, Burns said, "We're small, and that was our record-scratch moment to say 'Hey, pay attention to us!"'
There was a little backlash – some mothers didn't like giving up their special day. Others felt a day of silence was too passive.
Burns was moved to help mothers in poor countries after she herself nearly died in childbirth in 2003 — she hemorrhaged an hour after giving birth.
Lives can be saved with simple interventions, such as training midwives on how to stop bleeding.
While studying for a master's degree in public health at Columbia, Burns made a documentary, "No Woman, No Cry," which tells the stories of four women with risky pregnancies in Bangladesh, Tanzania, Guatemala and the United States, and includes home footage of her own brush with death shot by her husband, the filmmaker Edward Burns.
Her charity has given grants of $40,000 to $60,000 for midwife education in Haiti, prenatal care for poor women in Florida and a service offering rides to the hospital for women in labor in Uganda.
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