With the incredible increase in concern about COVID-19, it’s prudent that we think about not just washing our hands frequently but also sanitizing the electronics we handle all day. Think about it. Everything we touch throughout the day comes back to our phones. We might take public transportation, press elevator buttons and open doors all while texting and scrolling (and that's all before our workday even begins). Then, you sit down at your desk and get down to business on equipment that probably hasn't been sanitized in weeks or months, if ever. 

So how can you effectively "wash" the germs off of the things around you? Well, one of the easiest and most effective ways to sanitize and disinfect your phone and other gadgets is with UV light technology.

How Does UV Light Sanitization Work? The UV light spectrum consists of UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C lights. It's the UV-C light that can kill germs, so that's what you want to look for when searching for a sanitizing product. When aimed at dirty surfaces, UV-C light permanently destroys the DNA or RNA of bacteria and viruses, so they no longer pose a threat. 

But Does It Really Work? Because UV-C sanitization works best on smooth surfaces, it is likely to be most effective on phones and cases without a lot of crevices for germs to hide. Some products, however, are designed to hit objects with UV-C light from multiple angles to try and cover as much surface area as possible.

Sure, you could just use antibacterial wipes — if you can find them these days — but UV light sanitizers have the added environmental benefit of producing less waste. So that's another tick in the "pro" column. Plus, they bring great peace of mind to back up your good hygiene habits, especially during cold and flu season – not to mention when we're in a global pandemic.

Two UV-C Sanitizers.Here are two Homedics products – one specifically for smartphones and one that’s a larger pouch design for not only phones, but also keys, glasses, earbuds, and other small items.

HoMedics UV-Clean Phone Sanitizer ($80).With this perfectly portable pop-up sanitizer, you'll just place your phone inside, and two germicidal LEDs get to work on disinfecting your device in only one minute. That gives you the perfect opportunity to wash your hands thoroughly, and your phone will be all good to go by the time you get back. Then, you just collapse the case flat and slide it back into your bag or laptop case for patented UV-C LED sanitization on-the-go.
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HoMedics UV-Clean Portable Sanitizer ($100).Another excellent option for portable protection is this generously-sized pouch. It harnesses the power of four UV-C germicidal LEDs to sanitize and disinfect your phone and other gadgets from every angle. It even includes interchangeable phone and platform clips to ensure that your items sit perfectly inside for optimal germ-killing effect. Aside from blasting bacteria from your phone, you can use it to clean your keys, glasses, remotes, and whatever else you can fit inside.

We often take the quality of the water we drink for granted. Food is regularly tested for hygiene and safety, but that level of scrutiny doesn’t extend to water. With water, we usually take for granted that it’s clean if it looks, smells, and tastes okay. If only purity worked that way!

Lishtot TestDrop Prodoes what our senses cannot. Tests water for contaminants that we can’t see, smell, or taste. It scans water without needing to be immersed in it, and in a matter of 2 seconds, tells you if the water you’ve got is safe to drink or not.

In what outwardly seems like magic, the TestDrop Pro is capable of analyzing your water in seconds, without even being in contact with it. Water emits its own local electromagnetic field, which the TestDrop Pro reads. Using this electromagnetic reading, the TestDrop Pro can tell if your water is safe to drink or not. The device can test for lead, E. Coli, pesticides, chlorine, and more. The electromagnetic field emitted by the contaminants is different from that of pure water. So, using this electromagnetic reading, and a simple red and blue light, the TestDrop Pro can, within seconds, tell you whether your water is pure or not. It goes even a step further with Lishtot’s smartphone app (currently in beta testing), showing you the exact percentage of purity with remarkable accuracy!
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You can buy a TestDrop Pro at Amazonfor $50.

SAP has launched a blockchain-based supply chain tracking system to allow drug wholesalers to authenticate pharmaceutical packaging returned by pharmacies and hospitals. That should help them weed out counterfeit drugs from their supply chain.

SAP says it hopes to eventually expand the use of distributed ledger technology to cover a broader range of pharmaceutical supply chain processes.

According to the company, its blockchain-based solution helps customers comply with the US Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA), which establishes that as of November 2019, wholesalers must verify prescription drugs that are returned and intended for resale. This piece of legislation is tasked with protecting consumers from contaminated, stolen or fake medication.

Counterfeit drugs are a significant problem in the pharmaceutical industry. Research releasedby the World Health Organization in 2017 found that an estimated 1 in 10 medical products circulating in low-and-middle-income countries was either substandard or fake.

In the US, wholesalers encounter almost 60 million returns a year, accounting for an estimated $7 billion.
With the new software, customers can verify the product code, lot, expiration date and a unique serial number which is embedded in the barcode against manufacturers’ data stored in the blockchain.

It’s worth noting that the software was co-developed with other well-known pharmaceutical companies including Boehringer Ingelheim AG & Co. KG, GlaxoSmithKline plc and Merck Sharp & Dohme.

The news comes after SAP announced two industry consortia within the SAP Blockchain Consortium program in the fall of last year, but this is not the first time blockchain technology has been leveraged in a bid to fight counterfeit goods in the healthcare industry. In fact, Merck was looking to patentblockchain-based technology to bring greater transparency to the supply chain in June 2018.
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An immutable ledger such as blockchain would prove useful in the healthcare industry, so, it’s likely we’ll see similar projects launching soon.

A new method of analyzing images from CT scans can predict which patients are at risk of a heart attack years before it occurs, researchers say.

The technology, developed by teams at Oxford University and institutions in Germany and the United States, uses algorithms to examine the fat surrounding coronary arteries as it shows up on computed tomography (CT) heart scans.

The new heart attack warning system, called the Fat Attenuation Index (FAI), was tested in a large study published by The Lancet medical journal.

The study monitored the progress of 3,900 heart patients from Germany and the US for ten years after they had undergone a coronary CT scan or angiogram.

FAI predicted fatal heart attacks many years before they happened.

Fat gets altered when an artery becomes inflamed, serving as an early warning system for what one of the researchers believes could be up 30% of heart attacks.

“If you can identify inflammation in the arteries of the heart then you can say which arteries will cause heart attacks,” Oxford Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine, Charalambos Antoniades, said.

“With the new technology, we can achieve this by analyzing simple CT scans.”

Most heart attacks are caused by a build-up of plaque – a fatty deposit – inside the artery, which interrupts the flow of blood.

Currently, CT scans tell a doctor when an artery has already become narrowed by plaque.

With the new technology, for which the researchers hope to gain regulatory approval on both sides of the Atlantic within a year, doctors will be able to say which arteries are at risk of narrowing. 

“(We) can say your arteries are inflamed, and a narrowing will be developed five years down the line. So maybe you can start preventive measures to avoid this formation of the plaques,” Antoniades said.

Heart disease and stroke are the two most significant causes of death worldwide.

“Although we have not estimated the exact number of heart attacks that we can prevent, we could potentially identify at least 20% or 30% of the people before they have (one),” Antoniades said.
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An Oxford University spin-off company is now developing a service to analyze CT scans from across the globe in around 24 hours.

A new, low-cost technology could provide drinking water in regions where resources are scarce, or where natural disasters have struck.

Scientists have developed a new technology that uses the sunlight to purify water with near-perfect efficiency.

The idea of using energy from the sun to evaporate and purify water was reportedly described by Greek philosopher Aristotle over 2,000 years ago.

By draping black, carbon-dipped paperin a triangular shape and using it to both absorb and vaporize water, researchers have developed a method for using sunlight to generate clean water with near-perfect efficiency.
“Our technique is able to produce drinking water at a faster pace than is theoretically calculated under natural sunlight,” said Qiaoqiang Gan, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo in New York.

“Usually, when solar energy is used to evaporate water, some of the energy is wasted as heat is lost to the surrounding environment. This makes the process less than 100% efficient. Our system has a way of drawing heat in from the surrounding environment, allowing us to achieve near-perfect efficiency,” said the associate professor.

Researchers have launched a startup, Sunny Clean Water, to bring the invention to people who need it. The company is integrating the new evaporation system into a prototype of a solar still, a sun-powered water purifier.

Solar stills have been around for a long time. These devices use the sun’s heat to evaporate water, leaving salt, bacteria, and dirt behind.

Then, the water vapor cools and returns to a liquid state, at which point it’s collected in a clean container.
The technique has many advantages. It is simple, and the power source — the sun — is available just about everywhere. However, even the latest solar still models are somewhat inefficient at vaporizing water.

Researchers addressed this challenge by increasing the efficiency of their evaporation system by cooling it down.

A central component of their technology is a sheet of carbon-dipped paper that is folded into an upside-down “V” shape, like the roof of a birdhouse.

The bottom edges of the paper hang in a pool of water, soaking up the fluid like a napkin. At the same time, the carbon coating absorbs solar energy and transforms it into heat for evaporation.

The paper’s sloped geometry keeps it cool by weakening the intensity of the sunlight illuminating it. Since most of the carbon-coated paper stays under room temperature, it can draw in heat from the surrounding area, compensating for the regular loss of solar energy that occurs during the vaporization process.

Using this set-up, researchers evaporated the equivalent of 2.2 liters of water per hour for every square meter of area illuminated by the regular sun, higher than the theoretical upper limit of 1.68 liters, according to the new study.

The team conducted its tests in the lab, using a solar simulator to generate light at the intensity of one regular sun.

“Most groups working on solar evaporation technologies are trying to develop advanced materials, such as metallic plasmonic and carbon-based nanomaterials,” Professor Qiaoqiang said.
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“We focused on using extremely low-cost materials and were still able to realize record-breaking performance,” he said.

Chinese researchers have developed a method using microscopic robots to kill cancerous tumors and stifle future growth.

The study published in the journal Nature Biotechnology uses nanotechnology to deliver thrombin, an enzyme that helps blood to clot.

The thrombin was placed using DNA origami, a process where DNA is folded into specific shapes. In this case, the DNA-based nanorobot was formed into a hollow tube carrying thrombin, researchers said. When the nanorobot would come in contact with the tumor, the tube automatically would open and deliver the thrombin.

The scientists behind this study tested the delivery bots by injecting them into mice with human breast cancer tumors. Within 48 hours, the bots had successfully grabbed onto vascular cells at the tumor sites, causing blood clots in the tumor’s vessels and cutting off their blood supply, leading to their death.

Remarkably, the bots did not cause clotting in other parts of the body, just the cancerous cells they’d been programmed to target, according to the paper.

The scientists were also able to demonstrate the bots did not cause clotting in the healthy tissues of Bama miniature pigs, calming fears over what might happen in larger animals.

Nanotechnology is viewed as a promising option for treating cancer. It involves work in science, engineering or tech of objects the size of nanometers. For perspective, a human hair is between 80,000 and 100,000 nanometers wide, according to the National Nanotechnology Initiative. 

"Our data show that DNA nanorobots represent a promising strategy for precise drug delivery in cancer therapy," read an excerpt from the study.

The goal, say the scientists, is to eventually prove these bots can do the same thing in humans that’s been done in animals. Of course, more work needs to be done before human trials can begin.
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Regardless, this is a huge breakthrough in cancer research. The current methods of either using chemotherapy to destroy every cell just to get at the cancer cell are barbaric in comparison. Using targeted drugs is also not as exact as merely cutting off blood supply and killing the cancer on the spot. Should this new technique gain approval for use on humans in the near future it could have impressive effects on those afflicted with the disease.

Japanese researchers recently demonstrated artificial intelligence software capable of identifying and analyzing polyps found during a colonoscopy in less than a second.

The endoscopic system uses a magnified view of a colorectal polyp to study its features and compare it with 30,000 endocytoscopic images used for machine learning.

Researchers said they were able to predict the pathology of the polyp in less than a second, with 86% accuracy, based on a study assessing more than 300 polyps.

"The most remarkable breakthrough with this system is that artificial intelligence enables real-time optical biopsy of colorectal polyps during colonoscopy, regardless of the endoscopists’ skill," said Dr. Yuichi Mori, a researcher from Showa University in Yokohama, Japan and study lead, in a statement.

Mori said researchers now want to work on a broader study aimed at creating a system that can automatically detect polyps.

Its value to the medical world is a key reason why supporters such as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg are excited about the future of artificial intelligence. During a Facebook Live chat in July, Zuckerberg discussed how AI can create safer cars and diagnose diseases earlier.

"I’m just much more optimistic in general on this," he said.
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Critics of AI, most notably Tesla CEO Elon Musk, said governments should regulate how artificial intelligence is built and used to prevent potential global disasters.

Pancreatic cancer has a meager survival rate, with just 9% of patients surviving past five years. The disease, which killed Apple's co-founder Steve Jobs, is one of the hardest types of cancer to treat, but detecting and treating it early can make a big difference to survival rates. But researchers at the University of Washington have come up with a simple and incredibly accurate way to test for the cancer that people can administer themselves.

The team developed an app called BiliScreen, and with a smartphone's camera, it uses computer vision algorithms to detect levels of the chemical bilirubin in the whites of a person's eyes. With pancreatic cancer, bilirubin levels start to increase and eventually, it turns the whites of the eye yellow, which is also the case for hepatitis. However, when that yellowing becomes noticeable, the cancer is already very developed. BiliScreen can detect miniscule levels of bilirubin and provide users with an assessment of whether their levels are high enough to indicate possible disease. This is easier and cheaper than a blood test, which is the traditional test for the cancer and can be done before any symptoms start to show.
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To take lighting into account, the app can be used with either a special box that blocks out ambient light or paper glasses with colored squares around the edges that the app is calibrated to. With the box, BiliScreen was around 90% as accurate as a blood test in identifying concerning levels of bilirubin in a small, 70-person clinical study. 

Sometime in the last century, most professionals discovered that face-to-face meetings with clients weren't always necessary — or even desirable. Lawyers, accountants, engineers, architects and scores of other professional service providers discovered the phone. Then they unearthed email. Then video conferencing.
But not doctors. Most doctors today communicate with their patients the same way the Greek physician Galen did 2,000 years ago: one on one, in person.

Why is that?

One reason is unwise legislation. Another is resistance to change by the American Medical Association and state medical societies. A third reason is Medicare, whose payment practices tend to be copied by most employers and private insurers. But the biggest problem is that rank-and-file doctors have been unwilling to step into the modern age.

Thanks to the most recent legislative session, Texas became the last state in the union to allow physicians to consult by phone with patients they have never met. And that only came about after a long, hard struggle.

Take the case of Teladoc, a Dallas-based firm that provides telephone consultations to nearly 11 million patients nationwide. Say you are on a business trip and your allergy prescription runs out. You put in a call to Teladoc, and within 30 minutes you get a call back from a doctor who has access to your medical records. After a brief consultation, the doctor prescribes the medication you need.

Teladoc estimates that one-third of physician consultations don't require the doctor to be physically present. Further, a typical phone consultation costs about $40 to $50, compared with $130 for a family physician visit or $1,500 for a trip to the emergency room.

Great service? You would think so. But the Texas Medical Board (acting like a wholly owned subsidiary of the Texas Medical Association) tried to put Teladoc out of business and might have succeeded had the company not spent six years in a protracted court battle.

Telemedicine doesn't just lower costs. It has the potential to save lives.

Suppose you are a patient in an intensive care ward in southern Minnesota or parts of Iowa and Wisconsin. There is a chance that your vital signs are not being monitored by the staff of the hospital where you are. Instead, they could be monitored by the clinical staff of the Mayo Clinic, miles away. The Mayo Clinic's eICU (electronic intensive care unit) currently oversees 73 beds in remote locations.

Mayo provides expertise that is not available in local community hospitals. How a stroke is treated and how quickly it is treated have an enormous impact on patient recovery. With telemedicine, patients get access to the best that Mayo has to offer.

So who could be against this? The American Medical Association for one. The federal government for another. The official position of the AMA is that doctors must be physically present to deliver appropriate care. For the most part, Medicare payment policies follow AMA guidelines.

Technology is on its way, whether organized medicine likes it or not. Patients in 14 states can now download an app made by a Silicon Valley firm called Lemonaid Health. Customers fill out a questionnaire on eight simple health concerns, including sinusitis, birth control and acid reflux. These are reviewed by a doctor who can write a prescription — all for a fee of $15.

Health Tap, another startup company, offers an artificial intelligence product that allows patients to submit their symptoms and then get options on what to do next. Like an Uber for healthcare, the company connects patients to 107,000 doctors who are willing to answer general health questions.

A third California company makes a $200 iPhone attachment that operates like an otoscope. Parents can use it to look inside their child's ear, take a photo, send it to a doctor-on-demand and, for $49, get a diagnosis — potentially saving an expensive trip to the emergency room.
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A brand-new world awaits us. Patients are ahead of most doctors in getting there.

The Thermia online health educational tool, developed at Boston Children’s Hospital, has enabled one-month-faster prediction of seasonal influenza outbreaks in China, via its digital integration with a commercially-available wearable thermometer. The findings appear in a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. 

“The fact that we were able to predict influenza outbreaks faster than China’s national surveillance programs really shows the capacity for everyday, wearable digital health devices to track the spread of disease at the population level,” says the study’s lead author Yulin Hswen, who is a research fellow in Boston Children’s Computational Epidemiology Group and a doctoral candidate at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health.

Although the Boston Children’s team has previously demonstrated that social media can be used to track disease, this is the first time they’ve shown that outbreaks can be predicted through an integrated wearable device and online tool.

“Collectively, we are still coming to terms with the data deluge from wearable devices, but it is imperative that we begin to generate value from this data,” says the study’s senior author Jared Hawkins, PhD, who is the director of informatics at Boston Children’s Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator (IDHA). “From a public health perspective — as we have shown with this latest study — there is enormous potential for tapping this data for research, surveillance and influencing policy.”

Thermia, a fever educational tool created by the Boston Children’s team, works as a standalone digital application or can receive a child’s temperature reading directly through the iThermonitor, an FDA-approved, patch-like thermometer that is worn under the arm. This integration is possible under a license agreement between Boston Children’s and the iThermonitor’s manufacturer, Raiing Medical Inc., which is based in China. Although the wearable is available around the world, consumers in China have been the earliest adopters of the device.

In China, the Thermia-empowered iThermonitor has quickly gained popularity among digitally-savvy parents who have purchased the wearable device to monitor their child’s temperature. When iThermonitor detects a fever, parents can access Thermia via web or mobile and answer online questions about the child’s current symptoms and medical history.

Data collected from these interactions is anonymized and analyzed by the Boston Children’s team to track disease at the population level. Using this method, the team collected nearly 45,000 data points from China’s Thermia users between 2014 and 2016. They discovered that outbreaks of “influenza-like illnesses”, which had the hallmark signs of influenza, could be detected digitally in real time.

In comparison to the influenza surveillance data collected by the National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) of the People’s Republic of China, the data from iThermonitor and Thermia identified emerging outbreaks of the flu an entire month earlier.

In contrast, China has 620 million mobile internet users who can theoretically access the standalone Thermia application from any computer, smartphone or even the Amazon Alexa assistant.

“In geographically large and densely populated countries like China, tools like Thermia can provide better on-the-ground disease surveillance than by relying on data that is only captured at the point of treatment in the clinic,” says Hswen.
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You can access Thermia to learn about your child’s symptoms and contribute to Boston Children’s anonymized disease database.