Simple Solutions to Save the Poor

January 28, 2008

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The New Zealand Herald:nzherald.co.nz

Monday January 28, 2008

National StoryRSS

Simple solutions to save the poor

5:00AM Monday January 28, 2008By Donovan

Ray Avery is gaining recognition for Medicine Mondiale's Acuset IV Flow Controller.

Ray Avery's voice is hoarse. He's spent the past day yelling instructions on a building site, and there's not a lot of shout left.

The 57-year-old Aucklander is in Nepal with Medicine Mondiale, the non-profit organisation he founded to address some of the world's most pressing problems.

Working with the Bhaktapur Cancer Hospital, he is building a centre of excellence for cancer treatment in Nepal to give the thousands of Nepalese cancer sufferers who currently have no access to free treatment a far greater chance of survival.

It is just one of the projects Medicine Mondiale has on the go, and one of them has been nominated for the Saatchi & Saatchi Changing Ideas Award.

Medicine Mondiale's Acuset IV Flow Controller allows a simpler, cheaper alternative to the tricky and ineffective IV flow devices that result in the deaths of countless people in the developing world each year, either through the under-administration or over-administration of medicines.

Mr Avery was determined that no more people should die simply because they had no way of controlling the flow of crucial intravenous drugs into their bodies.

Now, the man who started life in the orphanages and streets of London is being recognised for attempting to make a significant difference to the world.

"I suppose I had quite a high chance of being a social reject, and it's nice to come out of that and be nominated for an international award," he says. "It just meant thinking of how to use our skills to make a difference in the world."

Mr Avery, a pharmaceutical scientist by trade, spent many years working for the Fred Hollows Foundation, which works to eradicate blindness in some of the world's poorest countries, and established Medicine Mondiale to develop broader technologies that would help to improve the lot of the world's poorest people.

That has included two state-of-the art intraocular lens laboratories in Eritrea and in Nepal to reduce the number of people going blind because of the high costs and low availability of intraocular lenses.

Medicine Mondiale has also developed a range of nutritional products for babies, to treat dehydration and malnutrition on a global scale and address the most common cause of infant death in the Third World.

The low-cost infant incubator is also intended to improve infant mortality by reducing the number of babies who die from low birth weight or infections.

Mr Avery says he set out to examine the root causes of some of the world's most common problems, such as infant mortality and the inefficient use of medication, and he is frustrated by the lack of global progress made on some of those issues.

"Science has largely abandoned the developing world and doesn't apply the technology that is needed. No NGOs are developing things or looking for solutions," he says.

"They spend so much money doing surveys and telling us what the problems are, and that money could be much better used actually going out there and fixing things.

"We haven't got these cheap, elegant solutions for every problem, but with this one we think we can improve medical care at every hospital worldwide."

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