Cover lets household drills into surgery

A sterile cover for hardware-store drills, which allows them to be used in operating rooms, is one of several innovations that the Grand Challenges of Canada program has chosen to support financially.

A sterile cover for hardware-store drills won financial support from the Grand Challenges of Canada program. Credit Arbutus, Grand Challenges Canada

by Donald G. McNeil Jr., The New York Times August 2, 2016

The drill cover is to help surgeons in low-budget hospitals who need to operate on broken bones or drill into skulls. Specialized electric surgical drills cost up to $30,000. Cheaper surgical hand drills are slow and hard to use.

The set includes a steel drill-bit holder that can be sterilized and attached to a fabric cover that can be bleached. The cover has been tested on over 10,000 patients in 14 countries.

The Grand Challenges program is paid for by the Canadian government and is similar to the Grand Challenges in Global Health announced by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2005. Officials take a special interest in efforts involving Canadian inventors or researchers.

The program also supported an audiometer that can be attached to an iPad with earphones allowing children to be screened for hearing loss, a common consequence of untreated ear infections. About 360 million people worldwide need hearing aids; in poor and middle-income countries, less than 1 percent get them.

Developed by Dr. Nitika Pant Pai and the Research Institute of McGill University Health Centre, HIVSmart! is a smartphone-based HIV self-test application that helps identify undiagnosed HIV cases and people at risk of infection. The team received $1 million.

The program also is supporting cervical cancer screening using a smartphone. Nurses can paint the cervix with vinegar to make lesions show up more vividly, and then transmit photographs to a specialist for diagnosis and recommendations on the level of care.

Another smartphone application supported by the Challenges program involved training community health workers to screen women in their neighborhoods or villages for breast cancer. Health workers with the application had more knowledge about telltale cancer signs and identified more women with possible breast anomalies.

Source The New York Times