Use Your Cell Phone To Diagnose Blood Diseases

A group of research engineers at Berkeley have developed a mobile phone microscope that can photograph microbes in your blood, and analyze them for disease. The group hopes the device will be useful to doctors in developing countries to diagnose blood diseases in the field. The device uses a phone attachment with an LED, and magnified images are fed into the cell phone camera. Software installed on the phone analyzes bacterial counts, or the images can be sent to labs for quick analysis. UC Berkeley bioengineer Dan Fletcher led the CellScope research team. He said, "The same regions of the world that lack access to adequate health facilities are, paradoxically, well-served by mobile phone networks. We can take advantage of these mobile networks to bring low-cost, easy-to-use lab equipment out to more remote settings . . . We had to disabuse ourselves of the notion that we needed to spend many thousands on a mercury arc lamp and high-sensitivity camera to get a meaningful image. We found that a high-powered LED — which retails for just a few dollars — coupled with a typical camera phone could produce a clinical quality image sufficient for our goal of detecting in a field setting some of the most common diseases in the developing world."

Comments

Re:It looks painful, but hopeful for Africa and In

[painehope]

Call it White-guilt or whatever

Are you smoking crack? Africa was a pestilent shithole before White people colonized the place, and is now even worse afterwards. The only time that Africa's natural resources (it's by-and-large one of the most fertile continents in the world) were efficiently farmed and distributed were when those evil White folks were running the government and farming the land. Africa went from a savage wilderness populated by sub-normal tribes (I'll give you a clue - look at the average IQ of Blacks outside of America, it's almost always below the level that is considered mentally retarded) to a productive continent (okay, there were some issues, but nothing compared to the rampant disease and warfare now) to a war-ravaged disease-infested shithole that can't even feed itself. All the Black governments in Africa condone, at least by omission, genocide against the remaining White farmers, yet cannot farm the land themselves. Then they blame White people and aliens (no shit, this claim was made by S. Africa's Minister of Health about 5 years ago) for their health and social problems. They can use AK-47s, yet simple agrarian farming tools are beyond them. Uh-huh. If you can load an assault rifle, you can fuel and run a tractor.

I see nothing that White people should feel guilty about what-so-fucking-ever.