A shampoo bottle saving babies in Bangladesh

Categories:

• Science

by K K

Posted on September 19, 2018

Dr Chisti from Bangladesh has invented an artificial respirator out of a shampoo bottle saving thousands of children's lives from pneumonia.

On a recent work trip to Melbourne, Australia, Dr Chisti was introduced to a type of ventilator called a bubble-CPAP, which is employed to help premature babies breathe. But the price for a standard bubble-CPAP is way too expensive for poor hospitals or remote counties such as Bangladesh.

So Dr Chisti decided to create his own bubble-CPAP, using a discarded shampoo bottle that contained leftover bubbles, an oxygen supply and some tubing. And it worked.

Last year 920,000 children under the age of five died of pneumonia. In Bangladesh pneumonia causes 28% of infant mortality. The hospital where Dr.Chisti is practising has now deployed the device and the percentage of children who die from pneumonia has fallen by 75%.

Now Dr Chisti plans to introduce his invention to other poor-country hospitals such as Ethiopia. The doctor said that his goal is for every hospital in developing countries to have the CPAP device available to them.