Difference between revisions of "Team:KUAS Korea/HP/Silver"
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<p><font size=4>In the meantime, the analyzation of stool is held in the pathology center in public health center. The stool samples from the test participants are cultured in isolation on MacConkey and SS culture medium. After culturing them, if a suspicious colony is detected, the center subculture this colony on KIA culture medium separately. Final identification is done through using special API kit. The principle of API kit is inoculating and culturing bacterial suspension in test tubes that have specific dry materials such as TDA or JAMES. While it is being cultured, if a specific bacteria, for example, Salmonella Typhi, the color of the test tube changes by itself or by addition of secondary reagent, and shows the presence of specific bacteria. The visualized color can be recognized its differences in each bacteria. Eventually, the test results are delivered to the participants. The analyzation process is held in a fixed procedure and takes up 26% of the task of each public health center test center.</font></p> | <p><font size=4>In the meantime, the analyzation of stool is held in the pathology center in public health center. The stool samples from the test participants are cultured in isolation on MacConkey and SS culture medium. After culturing them, if a suspicious colony is detected, the center subculture this colony on KIA culture medium separately. Final identification is done through using special API kit. The principle of API kit is inoculating and culturing bacterial suspension in test tubes that have specific dry materials such as TDA or JAMES. While it is being cultured, if a specific bacteria, for example, Salmonella Typhi, the color of the test tube changes by itself or by addition of secondary reagent, and shows the presence of specific bacteria. The visualized color can be recognized its differences in each bacteria. Eventually, the test results are delivered to the participants. The analyzation process is held in a fixed procedure and takes up 26% of the task of each public health center test center.</font></p> | ||
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Revision as of 10:12, 7 October 2017
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Human Practices
Current Occult Blood Test
The conventional occult blood test has to go to the hospital directly and it takes a long time for the examination. According to our investigation, the test itself is not expensive. However, the whole examine process need a few expensive laboratory facilities hence it is difficult to perform the test in a poor medical environment. Also, we thought that patients would feel uncomfortable and shameful in the process of submitting their stools.
To find out the current circumstances and inconveniences of occult blood test that we might possibly improve through our project, we contacted to local hospital, Anam hospital of Korea University Medical Center. Fortunately, the chief of the hospital diagnostic laboratory gave us the opportunity to observe and discuss about the actual examination process with researhcers of clinical laboratory. We visited the microbiology lab on September 5th and saw the process of actual test. Researchers took out some of the stool from the sample collected from each patients, diluted it in the test tube, and mixed it with the reagent and put it in the machine. The actual test time is about 3 hours, but since it is preferred to examine many samples (approximately 50 at a time) at one time, it took a long time gathering sufficient amount of samples from patients visiting the hospital.
In the Republic of Korea, the whole cost of the occult blood test is about $10, but our national health insurance service supports half. But in developing countries, $10 is quite expensive. The measuring machine is also very expensive. Therefore, reducing costs and time of occult blood tests is the key to our project.
In the current occult blood test, taking stool is inconvenient and offensive. In our survey of patient, ( )% of people do not want to do this project. (설문조사 내용 등등 나중에) Based on this, it would be very convenient for patients to be able to easily test by simply eating our probiotics.
Occult blood is a precursor symptom of various internal diseases. Early diagnosis is therefore crucial to preventing those diseases. Our probiotic system has the advantage that it can be easily diagnosed anywhere and anytime with low cost.
Current Stool Test
The fecal culture for infection is held at every public health center in Korea for 1.5 thousand won. This is one of the national medical insurance service offered from Korean Government and is needed for employment in the foodservice industry.
The process is as follows. First, you visit the public health center near your residence. After you write your personal information, they give you a cotton swab in a bottle. Then, you go to the restroom and collect your fetus component in your anal. If you submit the swab to the front desk, the clinical pathology center will analyze your stool and give permission your health document needed in employment. It takes about one to two weeks to receive your test results.
In the meantime, the analyzation of stool is held in the pathology center in public health center. The stool samples from the test participants are cultured in isolation on MacConkey and SS culture medium. After culturing them, if a suspicious colony is detected, the center subculture this colony on KIA culture medium separately. Final identification is done through using special API kit. The principle of API kit is inoculating and culturing bacterial suspension in test tubes that have specific dry materials such as TDA or JAMES. While it is being cultured, if a specific bacteria, for example, Salmonella Typhi, the color of the test tube changes by itself or by addition of secondary reagent, and shows the presence of specific bacteria. The visualized color can be recognized its differences in each bacteria. Eventually, the test results are delivered to the participants. The analyzation process is held in a fixed procedure and takes up 26% of the task of each public health center test center.
The statistical data provided by Inha medical university medical center shows that these tests are the most efficient regarding all existing techniques in detecting waterborne diseases such as cholera or typhoid fever, which are dangerous infectious diseases. However, even though these tests are held at a cost, the government budget is used in this process is sufficient compared to the number of detected disease carriers. The total national budget used in health center is 100 million won including labor costs, and allocation per one typhoid carrier is 1.11 thousand won at a year (Inha Medical school disease control center, 2008). However, the number of carriers found are below 100 and are identified in a sporadic pattern. Not only the expense used from the country but also time consummation could be inconvenient for the users who want the results in a short time. If we also calculate the time usage of visiting the health care center, this becomes a huge consumption, as the result comes about a week after on average. By researching about this process specifically, we could observe the expense charged in stool test in a reasonable manner.
While researching on cost analysis of current stool test, we thought that we could also analyze the cost efficiency of our own project ‘POO-robiotics’. If you follow our link down below, you could check our dry lab modeling on the expense compared with the previous stool tests.
국회의원
While we were working on a collaboration with other teams about legislations of GMM, we found out that current regulations are very limited for scientific progress. Moreover, throughout our visit to the public health center and hospital for an occult blood test, we checked how current tests are executed and their limitations.
We contacted one of the members of the Congress, Jeon, Hye-suk (전혜숙), who graduated from the college of pharmacy and has a master’s degree in medicine, health clinical pharmacology and made a visit. There we mainly discussed what kind of hurdles our product would have after it is released to the public. Our aim for visit was to demand improvement of associated laws and to further discuss how to make these ethical issues into the society. In order to enact or relieve a regulation, there must be the consensus of people in general. However, people barely give attention to synthetic and transformed microbes and thus it is even hard to publicize the issue. We concluded that we need to make efforts to communicate more with the public about GMO and further GMM and synthetic biology.
Under Korean current GMM law, the usage of the GMMs is strictly regulated by the ‘GMO law’. Compared to the United States where most plant GMOs are considered equivalent to non-GMOs and do not require much further approval unless they have significantly different protein, Korea has to go through many regulations and tests. Each test requires more than 210 days which makes the approval way longer. In addition, compared to the United States and Japan, where there are no requirements for labeling products or only requirements for labeling products that contain modified gene more than 5% of its materials, in Korea, where the product with more than 1% of genetically modified material, such as DNA and proteins, must be labeled as GM food. If there is less than 1%, it is not necessarily required.
In Pursuance of relaxation and improvement of regulations on GMMS, we compared ours to different nations’ and discussed with the Congress member to seek compromises. However, in conclusion, it seems that it is not a quick-and-easy problem that we can solve right away and have to see it in long-term requiring supports from the public and congress members.
