Looking back over 2013, the rate of development and innovation in cleanliness and hygiene continues unabated, whether this is in the area of particle detection and identification, protective clothing, antimicrobial materials, containment of hazardous substances or methods of decontaminating hospital rooms and equipment.
But although this is good news for staff and patients, the benefits will be experienced almost entirely in countries with the money and natural resources to adopt these new technologies. In the meantime, according to UNICEF, pneumonia and diarrhoea together claim the lives of more than 1.7 million children aged under five years across the globe every year.
A lack of resources – not just money, but also power, water, a transport infrastructure and suitable storage facilities – is preserving and even exacerbating the disparity between rich and poor nations in terms of healthcare outcomes, because even rudimentary hygiene measures such as handwashing regimes, clean linens and surgical instruments may be beyond reach.
Much of the attention in the media is focused on the pharmaceutical supply chain: high prices of drugs, counterfeit products with no active ingredients and the inability to get the right drugs to the rights patients at the right time and in the right condition. But underlying this is a much more basic lack of facilities in hospitals and clinics where a lack of clean water and an erratic electricity supply make treating patients an uncertain process on a daily basis.
Two innovations that could make a difference are the ability to sterilise using nanomaterials and the power of the sun and a laundry that cleans using compressed carbon dioxide in place of water. Neither of these will be an instant solution to the many challenges facing the less developed economies, but they do show that researchers and developers are taking into account the fact that the world has only finite resources, while the demands of the global population continue to rise.
The economic returns may not be huge, but the effects on human life could be enormous.
