(NaturalPath) According to a study out of the University of Alberta Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and published in The International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, a new innovative twist on renewable energy – a solar-powered oxygen delivery system – is saving lives in Africa. The project is providing concentrated oxygen in hospitals for children suffering from severe pneumonia.
“Solar-powered oxygen is using freely available resources – the suns and air – to treat children with pneumonia in the most remote settings,” said the main researcher. “It’s very gratifying for a pediatrician doing research in a lower-resource setting to fill a clinical gap and save lives. It’s what our work is all about.”
Pneumonia is serious as 900,000 children die of the disease worldwide each year, mostly in Africa and Asia. The roadblock is that though medications and vaccinations exist, they are being rolled out slowly in Africa where diagnostics are poor and chest x-rays are not readily available. That’s where this product comes in. The children with severe pneumonia have infected lungs that need concentrated oxygen until antibiotics begin to work as it helps overcome a problem with oxygen exchange caused by the lung infection. It a country like Canada, it’s by every bedside at a hospital, while it is more difficult to come by in a country like Uganda.
It got so bad the researcher noted, “In the hospital you often didn’t have access to oxygen cylinders. So the power goes out and you’re out of luck. We had children that died in front of our eyes.”
The solar-powered concentrated oxygen works just as well as the traditional method and solves a specific problem in developing countries. Now there is hope for those suffering from severe pneumonia. Physicians will have a more reliable source of concentrated oxygen to treat those individuals.
Razi Berry, Founder and Publisher of Naturopathic Doctor News & Review (ndnr.com) and NaturalPath (thenatpath.com), has spent the last decade as a natural medicine advocate and marketing whiz. She has galvanized and supported the naturopathic community, bringing a higher quality of healthcare to millions of North Americans through her publications. A self-proclaimed health-food junkie and mother of two; she loves all things nature, is obsessed with organic gardening, growing fruit trees (not easy in Phoenix), laughing until she snorts, and homeschooling. She is a little bit crunchy and yes, that is her real name.