Here’s great news for helping out the needy in 3rd world countries, it’s the fact that egg beaters with handles as shown above can be used as centrifuge for seperating plasma from blood.  Now, try using one of those Black and Decker automatic egg beaters and you got a perfect centrifuge without spending thousands of dollars on centrifuge machines!  Sometimes, hard problems can be solved with simple solutions.

The low-cost centrifuge replacement can separate plasma from blood in minutes, which is used in tests to detect lethal infectious diseases responsible for half of all deaths in developing countries.

George Whitesides and colleagues at Harvard University, US, say the plasma obtained is easily good enough to use in tests to detect diseases such as Hepatitis B and cysticercosis.

“The object was to separate serum [plasma] from blood using readily-obtained materials in a resource-constrained environment,” explains Whitesides.

The equipment can be bought from shops for around two dollars. It needs no special training to use, no electricity or maintenance, and can be sterilised with boiling water and reused.

The user can even prepare several samples at once – just by taping more lengths of tubing to the beater.

via gizmodo, source

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