Emergency Preparedness

DIY Health

Honey the Best Medicine
WISCONSIN, USA, Oct, 11, 2006 (Brandon Keim, Wired Magazine) - When Jennifer Eddy first saw an ulcer on the left foot of her patient, an elderly diabetic man, it was pink and quarter-sized. Fourteen months later, drug-resistant bacteria had made it an unrecognizable black mess. Doctors tried everything they knew -- and failed. After five hospitalizations, four surgeries and regimens of antibiotics, the man had lost two toes. Doctors wanted to remove his entire foot. With standard techniques exhausted, Eddy turned to a treatment used by ancient Sumerian physicians, touted in the Talmud and praised by Hippocrates: honey. Eddy dressed the wounds in honey-soaked gauze. In just two weeks, her patient's ulcers started to heal. Pink flesh replaced black. A year later, he could walk again. http://www.wired.com/news/technology/medtech/0,71925-0.html

Emergency Preparedness / Science and Technology

A $3 Water Purifier That Could Save Lives
DENMARK,10 October 2006 (Donald G. McNeil Jr., The New York Times) - In very poor countries, the family that has to walk miles to fetch drinking water from a well or a stream may be the lucky one. In many villages, the water source is a filthy pond trod by animals and people, or a mud puddle out next to the yam field. As a result, about 6,000 people a day - most of them children - die from water-borne diseases. Vestergaard Frandsen, a Danish textile company that supplies water filters to the Carter Center guinea worm eradication program and mosquito-killing plastic tarps to refugee camps, has come up with a new invention meant to render dangerous water drinkable. The invention is called Lifestraw, a plastic tube with seven filters: graduated meshes with holes as fine as 6 microns (a human hair is 50 to 100 microns), followed by resin impregnated with iodine and another of activated carbon. It can be worn around the neck and lasts a year. http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/101206HA.shtml