Ryan's Bill: Austism Insurance Bill Passes

We focus so much on global health in this blog it is easy to miss sight of those underserved closer to home. South Carolina resident Lorri Unumb can celebrate a small victory towards raising her son Ryan, who has autism. It turns out that most insurance companies won't cover autism therapy. This is ludicrous---you get hurt in a car wreck and you can go get physical therapy to get your walking muscle memory back. You suffer some sort of mental impairment and it's considered "educational therapy". Well, thanks to Unumb, insurers in South Carolina can no longer take cover behind this logic.

"I've met so many other moms who were doing the best they could, and I just wanted to say to them, 'You know, an hour a week of speech therapy for your child is never going to make him better,' " the mother of three says.

"But I didn't want to tell them what they needed is 40 hours a week of therapy, because there's nothing they can do to buy that."

Nothing they can do because most medical insurance policies generally don't cover autism treatment, and it's too expensive for many parents to afford out of pocket. Ryan's therapy costs between $70,000 and $80,000 a year. That's Lorri Unumb's entire salary.

Well, it didn't hurt that Lorri Unumb is both a lawyer and a law professor. She soon turned a sour situation into a solution that helps her family countless others. Professor Unumb, way to go!

More at CNN

Neat Stuff Roundup

• Google for Non-Profits
• Anne Swift on universities as entrepreneurship ecosystems
• The next 11 BRICs according to Goldman Sachs
• Testing vaccines in a jar
• Foreign Policy on the Digital Divide
  

World TB Day

Thanks to Aman at THD Blog, I am informed that today is World TB Day. I'm not sure how you treat this: "Happy TB Day", "May you and yours have a wonderful TB Day" do not seem appropriate.



THD by way of Christine at Families USA has featured an anti-TB game:

In response*, my group at MIT has developed the XoutTB diagnostic paper microfluidic toolset. It aims to keep patients on track with their meds at a cost of a penny a day. X out TB program is currently under continued development at MIT with the assistance of partners in the Ministry of Health in Nicaragua, the InterActive Research and Development group in Karachi, Pakistan, and the guidance of the Poverty Action Center. Funding has been provided by the IDEAS Competition (Lemelson Award in International Technology) and private donations.


*In response to TB, not TB Day, but it is fitting that I make the announcement on LTDC on March 24, don't you think?

2008 NCIIA Annual Conference: Wrap up

3 : Hours in the ER before my DC flight due to Aerovax prototype airborne shrapnel landing in my left eye
7:30 : Scheduled departure from Logan to Dallas on Tuesday
5 : Number of liquid crystal displays on the Airtran Embraer Jet taking me to DC connection
1 : Number of check engine lights that rendered the LCDs useless and grounding the flight
2:30 : Arrival time into Dallas the next afternoonDespite the misadventures of travel, I left the 2008 NCIIA Conference wiser and humbled, having met an oustanding group of individuals and institutions working on fascinating products, educational strategies, and global challenges. I'm going to provide some detailed notes at the expanded Conferences and Lectures version of LTDC.

A quick preview:

• Paul Polack on Design for the Other 90% (it's not just the museum exhibit, it's going to change the face of business and products for folks in emerging markets)
• Sir Ken Robinson on creativity.
• The Small Engines group from the Global Innovation Center in Energy, Health and Environment at Colorado State University (guys I need a link here).
• Baylor University's efforts of transforming coconuts into Home Depot products
  

More after coffee break (Dallas has a severe deficit of Starbucks, though).

TB Compliance the "smart pillbox" way

Those nerds at the Massachusetts Institute for Technophobes have done it again by inventing the "uBox" - a souped up version of the humble pillbox, that tracks how often people take their medication and improves compliance with drug dosage. The device comes with a USB that enables healthcare workers to plug into the pillbox and download the compliance record. Read more..

DIY drilling: Neurosurgery in the developing world

Who knew that a Bosch drill could have so many uses? When working for the National Health Service, Marsh uses a £30,000 compressed-air medical drill, but he uses a £30 drill with the standard medical drill bits when operating in less ideal settings in Ukraine. How does he ensure patient safety? "The traditional way... by talking to them throughout the operation." Read more...

Thanks to Kevin MD via Medgadget

Telemicroscopy

The folks in the Blume Center for Developing Economics have devised a nifty little device that can provide 50x magnification by adding $50 in off-the-shelf components to a cellphone camera. Called the 'Cellscope', this initiative "extends the reach of modern microscopy by turning the camera of a standard cell phone into a clinical-quality microscope. With a magnification of 5-50X, cell-phone microscopy will enable visualization of patient samples critical for disease diagnosis. Images captured by health workers on a microscope-equipped cell phone could be annotated, organized, and transmitted to medical experts at major medical centers for analysis and recommendation. Preliminary work has demonstrated the technical feasibility of this ‘telemicroscopy’ concept." Read More about it here or visit the project page.

Hat tip to Medgadget

The OR Channel: TV dinners are never gonna look quite the same

When I was 3 or 4 year old, I ran into my grandfather's collection of 35mm projection slides of surgical procedures that he used to teach his students in medical school. I remember that the images were fascinating (at least for me) and left an indelible mark on my view of the human body: Try to understand a 3 year old who goes "eyes, nose, ears, hands, feet, liver, pancreas, vein." Fast forward a long time and instead of becoming a vascular surgeon like Pepe, I grew up to design devices that he could have used. Problem is that I am out of 35 mm projection slide discovery opportunities...so I ran into this today:



OR Live is a website offerings video streams of 600 different surgical procedures.
Each procedure comes from different institutions so you can get a good sense of how each procedures varies by physician and hospital.

Play doctor online using CureHunter

Before you send me your letters, don't try this at home without adult supervision and please don't start Googling your symptoms. Okay, now the fun part.

CureHunter is an online web service that provides access to medical literature in a straight forward interface. So next time you are arguing about the performance of Cimetidine and Omeprazole, do yourself a favor and go to CureHunter's Mobile site. Type in a disease or a drug, and it will tell you what is the generally accepted therapy. I know, it takes an MD to really figure out what a person has, etc. etc. This is a tool and timely one.

Healthcare workers with GPRS access will find it invaluable.

More at Medgadget

A Cancer Breathalyzer

Researchers at Swansea Univrsity in Wales are developing a method for detecting cancer and other diseases using your breath. Medgadget reports that Dr. Masood Yousef and his research team have been working on improved volatile marker-based diagnostics. This has been tried before but the improved analytics are bringing them closer to being a reality. The impact for global health could be huge if the costs of the test remain reasonable (no word on pricing yet). Imaging a scenario where a nomadic patient can be given a test result that would usually take a week to come back from the lab—and an additional two weeks to go back and track the person. I'll keep my tabs on this one. Dr. Yousef, if you are reading this, we'd love to chat and introduce you to some cool cellphone technology we're developing with these types of technologies in mind.

Dr Yousef [Dr Masood Yousef, senior research assistant in the Welsh Centre for Printing and Coating at Swansea University -ed] believes that the breath test will provide a more convenient and rapid method for diagnosing serious diseases than blood or urine analysis, and will require minimal medical intervention.

He said: "Breath samples are much easier to collect than blood and urine, for the patient as much as for the person collecting the sample. They can be collected anywhere by people with no medical training, and there are no associated biohazard risks."

Little Devices That Could @ AAAS

Our friend Aman at state of the art THD Blog sent us an opportunity to participate in a global health panel at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Boston Sunday February 17, 2008.

So for those of you based in Boston looking for a good excuse to dodge the weather on a Sunday afternoon, come by the Hynes Convention Center this Sunday and say hello.

There will be a discussion on the intersection of global health, technology, and the role of the entrepreneur. We owe the invitation to Usha Balakrishnan, CEO of Cartha, a fledging organization in the business of fostering innovative opportunities for social entrepreneurs and the next generation of thought leaders. Thanks Usha!

As additional incentive, Cat at AIDG has a great preview on all the other panels at AAAS for you to go to.

Smoking will kill 1 billion

Some devices suck. A recently unveiled WHO report on smoking reveals some shocking stats on cigarettes. According the Bloomberg (as in Mayor Michael) financed report, smoking will kill 1 billion people this century. China, India, and Indonesia will top the list. As these economies mature, and purchasing power increased for consumers, the rise of cigarette purchases will be inevitable.



According to Foreign Policy

While progress has been made in many countries thanks to higher taxes and bans in public places (the unbelievable smoking ban in Paris cafes, for example), smoking is on the rise in the developing world. The WHO projects that one billion people, 80 percent of them in the developing world, will die of smoking-related illnesses by the end of the century if trends continue on their current trajectory.

More after the jump.

Update: Adding insult to injury, the Chinese government wants to encourage smoke-free restaurants during their Olympic Games. The backlash from consumers that insist on smoking have put certain restaurants on the brink of going out of business.

HST 939 is Launched: First Day of Class

Previously mentioned HST 939 has been launched! I'll be back blogging starting (now) since most of the hard work getting ready for the course is done. There's a nice cross section of students from many different fields (including some students from across the country finding creative ways to get credit for taking the class via telecourse).

more to come in the next few days!
Jose

ABC drama series takes pseudo science to primetime. TV writing reaches a new low.

ABC is launching a new legal drama revolving around a family with an autistic child. The father is an attorney who starts having second thoughts about defending pharmaceutical companies. After a moment of inspiration, or an overdose of late night infomercials, he decides to sue big pharma for creating vaccines that cause autism.

In other news, the same network will launch a reality series focusing on the aerodynamics of pigs vying for the X Prize.

Frankly, I am not a big fan of railing against corporations, but ABC and parent Disney better provide an honest effort to correct a message that is sure to fan the flames of the vaccine-autism quacks. What is wrong with these people? I realize the writers are on strike, but reverting to an issue that clearly puts children in harms way by convincing more parents that vaccines are wrong is irresponsible. It wipes any type of CSR and save-the-world intentions the companies claims to abide by. For people like myself who try to make vaccines more widely available by either developing delivery technologies, or others who work on actual vaccines, this is a straight up insult.

It's one thing to see a one-time episode of ripped-from-the-headlines plots like in Law and Order. It's another thing to make a complete series whose sole aim of entertaining can undermine years of public health education.

I hope it gets cancelled. I hope it never gets syndicated to other markets, particularly in the developing world, where vaccines are often the most reliable way of securing a child's life. I hope they put back to back Surgeon's General warnings before and after the show. I hope they pledge the a portion of the profits to GAVI. Let's see if they put that in the Annual Report.

Don't send your letters to me, send them to ABC.

More at NYTimes

PS This is our first official rant. :)

Google unleashes massive storage bank for scientists

According to Wired, the company plans to offer algorithms for searching and visualizing the data sets, as an offshot of their acquisition of Gapminder.

| View | Upload your own

According to Wired, the company plans to offer algorithms for searching and visualizing the data sets, as an offshot of their acquisition of Gapminder.

(Google people) are providing a 3TB drive array (Linux RAID5). The array is provided in “suitcase” and shipped to anyone who wants to send they data to Google. Anyone interested gives Google the file tree, and they SLURP the data off the drive. I believe they can extend this to a larger array (my memory says 20TB).

One of the more interesting details is that they will actually SHIP you a suitcase with 3TB of storage for you to load your data and ship it back. I guess 3TB is not that bandwidth friendly.

More at http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/google-to-provi.html

One of the more interesting details is that they will actually SHIP you a suitcase with 3TB of storage for you to load your data and ship it back. I guess 3TB is not that bandwidth friendly.

More at http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/01/google-to-provi.html

It's little, it's (RED), it helps Africa

Dell just announced that they are teaming up with Microsoft to produce a line of crimson red XPS PC to raise funds under the (Red) program benefiting Africa's fight against AIDS and debt.

The offering will include both laptops and desktops and will net $50 and $80 to the fund respectively.

The XPS M1330 is a nice little machine that I have been seriously looking at. Given the demise of my Sony early this month, it may be time to give these machines another look.

If you would like to make a laptop donation, I'd be happy to receive the hardware and notify Bono that the $50 are in your name.

Full scoop in the NYTimes