UV Scope

Mirror; Mirror on the wall, am I the culprit, or am I not?

Unfortunately, unlike Snow White’s story, the magic mirror in the medical world seldom spoke the truth. The stethoscope was never proved guilty until recent times and continued spreading infections that caused morbidity of numerous patients who visited healthcare set-ups in the hope to get them treated for a previous infection. Who knew that this device can be a trap and the patient will now fall in the clutches of nosocomial and iatrogenic infections?

Stethoscope :  noun [steth-uh-skohp] A physician’s extended hand used for auscultation that is now capable of transmitting micro-organisms that can cause hospital-borne infections.

Strange, isn’t it? People’s own God and savior- a physician may transmit the illness to his patients with the root being his sword, the stethoscope. Discovered in the year 1876 by Rene Laennac, the stethoscope was one of the milestones in the field of medicine. Walking down the history lane the discoverer and then the following physician’s main concern was never about the microorganisms that were harboring on the rubber of the instrument but was focused on the diagnosis of the disease, the patient presented with. Now that we are achieving our goals of aseptic surgeries, hygienic set-ups, and successful treatments, we are somewhere lagging behind in a stream that is trivial yet crucial – sterile examinations.

Worry not! To combat this step-back some a group of our young medicos are all set to introduce a technical model which can sterilize this culprit of nosocomial infections. Isha Jain, Salman Khan, and Vaibhav Sargar together have come up with the idea of UV SCOPE.

UV SCOPE :  UV SCOPE is a device that will help sterilize the stethoscope with the help of UV rays in an efficient way which will not only sterilize the stethoscope but also cut down time preventing it from becoming a tedious process. As the researchers stated that just a contact of the stethoscopes with the patient was capable of transmitting potentially deadly bacteria including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus bacteria (MRSA), there is an urgent need of developing an instrument that will de-contaminate the device.