Cheaper way to treat pneumonia
In a major breakthrough, scientists in Bangladesh have developed a low-cost technology for treating infants suffering from severe pneumonia and hypoxaemia.
Dr Jobayer Chisti, who led a research to develop this technology, said it is more effective than the standard oxygen therapy used in the developing countries.
Lung infections by bacteria or viruses cause pneumonia while hypoxaemia means abnormally low level of oxygen in the blood. Infants below the age of five who die from diseases constitute 13 percent of the total deaths of children in Bangladesh.
In the traditional low-flow oxygen therapy, patients receive only oxygen but the new method -- called bubble continuous positive airway pressure (Bubble CPAP) -- requires a water-filled bottle with a pipe going through a nasal hole in addition to the oxygen flow, explained Dr Chisti.
Bubbles are created in the bottle, which then put backpressure on lungs, thus creating continuous positive airway pressure, said the scientist at the Centre for Nutrition and Food Security of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Diseases Control, Bangladesh (icddr,b).
With the continuous bubble pressure, a child's lung opens and his/her collapsed tissues get active, increasing the chances of the their survival, he added.
Famous medical journal, The Lancet, published an article on Bubble CPAP for children with severe pneumonia and hypoxaemia in Bangladesh: an open, randomised controlled trial on Tuesday.
Scientists at the icddr,b and the Centre for International Child Health at the University of Melbourne conducted the research in Dhaka between August 2011 and July 2013.
The random trial was conducted on 225 children. Of them, 79 received oxygen therapy by Bubble CPAP, 67 low-flow oxygen therapy, and 79 high-flow oxygen therapy that is an expensive treatment used mostly in developed nations.
Significantly, fewer children in the Bubble CPAP group had treatment failure and deaths than the low-flow oxygen therapy group, said Dr Chisti, lead scientist and author of the research. On the other hand, the success rates in the Bubble CPAP group and the high-flow oxygen therapy group were very close.
Dr Chisti explained that Bubble CPAP is not something new globally. It is used in the developed countries to treat newborns, but the equipment they use is very expensive.
“Our research, however, focused on children under five, not only newborns. Also, we used cheap equipment,” he told The Daily Star yesterday.
A circuit, a bottle and a small piece of pipe cost no more than Tk 50 in Bangladesh and US$100 in a developed country.
“Icddr,b's study is the first in a developing country to trial the effectiveness of a cheaper version of Bubble-CPAP at reducing mortality and treatment failure for the children under five with severe pneumonia and hypoxemia,” said Dr Chisti.
The new method can be used in other hospitals in the country and in other countries having high child mortality rates because of pneumonia, especially those in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia, he added.
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