Friday, January 29, 2010

Arsenic Removal without Chemical

An international research team comprising researchers from India, Netherlands, Germany and UK has designed a chemical free method to purify water laced with arsenic. Six such plants are now in operation a village of West Bengal. The study was conducted in Kasimpore, a village in North 24 Parganas District, approximately 25 km from Kolkata. In all cases, total As in treated water was less than the WHO guideline value of 10 microgram per litre.


The chemical free plant produces no sludge and the operation cost is 1.0 US dollar per day for producing 2000 L of potable water. The findings of the study have been published in the December 2009 issue of Environmental Pollution.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Novel Diagnostic Kit for Rural Areas

A research team from Kolkata has designed a low cost, low power and high speed novel diagnostic system that can detect diseases even in absence of the physician the approaching critical condition of a patient at an early stage. It is suitable for diagnosis of patients in the rural areas of developing countries where availability of physicians and availability of power is really scarce.

Known as field programmable gate array (FPGA), the diagnostic system could be installed in health care centres of rural areas where patients can register themselves for periodic diagnoses detecting potential health hazards at an early stage. The FPGA based smart system has been applied for early detection of renal criticality of patients. For renal diagnosis, body mass index, glucose, urea, creatinine, systolic and diastolic blood pressures have been considered as pathophysiological parameters.

The system has successfully worked on the population of 80 patients under study and an accuracy of up to 97.5% in renal diagnosis has been obtained. The findings of the study have been published in the December 2009 issue of Journal of Medical System.