Reports from Ecuador

Sally–the salad spinner centrifuge Lauren, Kelly, Nazima and I have spent the past year developing–made her Ecuador debut today!  Amanda and I drew six samples of blood and demonstrated the centrifugation process to María Alicia, Marisol, Daniel (a volunteer at the office) and a member of the custodial staff.  We centrifuged all six at the same time (meaning that one of the five comb segments was holding two blood samples).  The staff at Fundacíon Futuro seemed excited about the process for collecting  blood samples and loading them into the centrifuge, but was ostensibly disappointed that it would take 10 minutes of spinning for the blood to separate, a known disadvantage of the device.  However, everyone was surprised at how quickly the time passed, and so excited for the results!  Everyone took turns using the adapted reader cards, and they appreciated that we had marked the anemic zones directly on the reader card.  While we did not run control samples in the Zipocrit, the benchtop model widely used in the US, Sally seemed to work beautifully!  There was one exception: one blood sample did not entirely separate, leaving a pinkish region occupying about one-fifth of the blood volume.  We observed severalpossible reasons for this anomoly.  First, when we drew this sample, we were having difficulty collecting enough blood, creating three large air bubbles.  Of the other samples, there was a small bubble in about half of them, but not as big or as many as in this unsuccessful sample.  On that note, it was exciting to see that for all samples with bubbles, Sally worked well enough to force out the air, something that we had struggled with in lab.  Second, this blood sample was the one sample that was not centered within a comb; it was at the extreme end of one of the combs, although I did make sure that it was still lined up with the middle correctly.  The other possibility is that we drew this blood sample last, meaning that it had the least amount of time to separate naturally via gravity.  Hopefully we will be able to determine what exactly caused the problem when we take it to the communities.  Overall everyone at Fundación Futuro seemed very, very excited about Sally, so we are eager to see what the health promoters in Plancha Loma think about the design.