Getting an injection may seem safe. But be wary. Some 1.3 million deaths a year come from the reuse of syringes. As many as 40 percent of the 40 billion injections patients get a year use syringes which are being reused but were not sterilized, according to the World Health Organization. The practice also leads to over 30 percent of Hepatitis B and C cases and 5 percent of HIV cases found among human beings.
Someone is doing something about this crisis. David Swann, a reader in design at the U.K.-based University of Huddersfield, is developing a "behavior-changing syringe" which lets patients know a needle is unsafe.
"The difficulty for patients is that it is impossible to determine a visual difference between a used syringe that has been washed and a sterile syringe removed from its packaging," Swann recently told The Guardian newspaper. "Instigating a color change would explicitly expose the risk and could indicate prior use without doubt."
In order to keep the price down – and in this way making it more available – Swann used technology employed in the food industry. He used inks which react to carbon dioxide. The syringes are also placed in nitrogen-filled packets.
“Once opened and exposed to the air, the syringe has a 60-second treatment window before turning bright red, while a faceted barrel design means that the piston will break if someone tries to replace it,” The Guardian said.
The product is being tested in India, where over 60 percent of injections are unsafe, and 30 percent of these transmit a disease.
"There are landfill scavengers searching piles of waste for syringe devices that are then sold on to medical establishments," Swann told The Guardian. "We want to break that cycle."
For his work in the field, Swann was placed on the shortlist for the People’s Choice Award for INDEX: Design to Improve Life Awards, according to the University of Huddersfield.
There are other examples of color-changing technology being used in medical applications.
For instance, Gautam and Kanupriya Goel developed packages which hold medicine and change patterns when the product expires.
"Outside of the West, there is little awareness of the concept of a medicine becoming expired," the Goels said in a statement to the newspaper. "We're not even just talking about the market shelf-life of a medicine strip here. It's alarming how little the average person understands how quickly a medicine becomes dangerous for consumption."
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
