in action

30

WHO in action

Safe and sound

Four evenings a week, as the sun sinks behind the peaks of Lesotho, a soft hissing can be heard within the shadows of St Gabriel's Mission health centre at Quatchers Neck. In the last light, Nurse Virginia checks her records and listens attentively for the bell which will mark the end of the steam sterilization cycle. The portable steam sterilizer, perched like a singing kettle on a small gas heater, has transformed her working life. At dawn the next day, she will carry this vital equipment, packed in the same blue shoulder bag that contains all the sterile instruments needed for the day, high into the mountains to conduct an immunization and antenatal clinic for these remote communities.

Gone are the days when frustrated mothers waited for one or two shared syringes to be boiled for a few

minutes between each injection. Gone, too, are the days when contaminated needles introduced new infections.

Virginia's portable steam sterilizer is one of half a million sterilizers introduced worldwide, since 1984, by WHO and UNICEF, following very positive experiences in Brazil where similar small steam sterilizers had been used. The sterilizers guarantee complete sterility, even when carried or stored for long periods after the heating cycle. •

Gone ore the days of unsafe in;ections.

Perfect pictures

People in Parakou-boko, Benin, are lucky. Their local hospital has a dream of a machine- the WHO Basic Radiological System (BRS) X-ray unit. Sleek and smart, versatile yet rugged, this single ingenious machine can be used to X-ray infants or the elderly, to examine a broken limb or

The WHOinspired X·ray machines can diagnose many ills.

World Health • Moy-June 1992

severe head injury, to look for the cause of a lingering cough or a pain in the stomach- or elsewhere.

Using the WHO-inspired machine, doctors at the centre will be able to find out what is wrong with the patients and how they should be treated. They know they will be getting the best quality pictures in the world. Independent tests have shown that image quality using the BRS excels that produced by conventional equipment costing several times as much. Which is why -even in rural Parakou-boko- the local hospital can afford to give its patients the very best.

This machine, developed to meet Third-World needs, is so very good, in fact, that units can now be found in the hospitals of the world's wealthiest nations. •