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When her Danish colleagues first suggested distributing protective cloth face masks to people in Guinea-Bissau to stem the spread of the coronavirus, Christine Benn wasn’t so sure.

“I said, ‘Yeah, that might be good, but there’s limited data on whether face masks are actually effective,’” says Benn, a global-health researcher at the University of Southern Denmark in Copenhagen, who for decades has co-led public-health campaigns in the West African country, one of the world’s poorest.A medical device that is used to inject fluid into, or withdraw fluid from, the body. A medical syringe consists of a needle attached to a hollow cylinder that is fitted with a sliding plunger. The downward movement of the plunger injects fluid; upward movement withdraws fluid. Medical syringes were once made of metal or glass, and required cleaning and sterilization before they could be used again. Now most syringes used in medicine are plastic and disposable.The conventional disposable infusion set originally has a protective cover on the needle, which prevents the package and the operator from being punctured and stabbed, and is usually discarded during normal operation. In this project, we transformed such protective cover into a new type one named safety tube. The inner diameter of the safety tube is slightly larger than the outside diameter of the needle body, and the length of the tube is slightly longer than the total length of the needle head plus the needle body. There is a slit along the length from the front to the middle of the tube. The open end (front) of the tube linked with the slit is in the shape of a “V,” the end of the slit at the middle of the tube is linked with a rectangular hole, and the joint is in the shape of an inverted “V.” The safety tube is in register with the needle, and the fin of the needle is out of the rectangular hole. During infusion, the fin is pushed to make the needle slide along the slit out of the tube, and after infusion, the needle slides back into the tube for safety. The safety tube has been commissioned to a qualified manufacturer and applied to the clinical trial. Meanwhile, it was approved by the hospital ethics committee.

200 inpatients who were in need of infusion therapy from October to December 2018 were enrolled and randomly divided into the intervention group and the control group. There was no significant difference in age and disease diagnosis between the two groups (The bandage features a wound contact layer, breathable outer barrier, microfluidic fluid collector, and a flexible immunosensor, NUS said in a statement Thursday. Using an electrochemical system, the hospital bandage detect various biomarkers specific to chronic wounds and facilitate the assessment of the wound's microenvironment, inflammation, and state of infection.

The microfluidic wound fluid collector, which is attached to the sensor, directs and enhances fluid delivery to the sensor by up to 180%, according to NUS, adding that this helps ensure the sensor can perform reliably regardless of the ulcer shape or size.