Ending Hospital Infections with R2D2

Nope, you read the title right, and if you just take a look at the picture, you'll see what I'm talking about:

This is a new product called the Xenex, developed at the Houston Technology Center by epidemiologists Julie Stachowiak and Mark Stibich. Built to use UV light to kill harmful microorganisms, the Xenex is now in about two dozen hospitals across the country, and the efficiency of these machines has sparked interest.

Dr. Mary Jo Cagle, the chief quality officer of Cone Health, a five-hospital healthcare system in North Carolina, recently evaluated the benefits of the Xenex in her hospitals. Since four of Cone's hospitals began using the Xenex in January 2011, the chain has reduced its incidence of MRSA infections by 35% hospital-wide, and lowered it to zero in the intensive care units, where infections can be the most devastating.

For very sick patients, a bug as common as MRSA (which was hyped up in the media a couple of years ago) could spell disaster. At Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts, there was a 67% drop in cases of infection related to the superbug C. diff, which can cause diarrhea, sepsis and death, even in a relatively healthy patient.

So what's the secret behind this wonderful machine? Light, specifically of the UV variety. The same light that you fear because of the threat of sunburn and melanoma is being used to clean hospital rooms of dangerous little bugs that could make patients even sicker. While the details of how the UV light kills the microorganisms are unknown at the time of this writing, my guess is that it has something to do with the resonant frequency of the bugs.

This is a great idea that anyone should appreciate, but the real publicity and marketing guy making the magic happen is Brian Cruver, a former Enron trader. As a former part of a company that leaves a bitter imprint on the economy for its rampant corruption, he says he "wanted to get involved with ventures that did some good." Since he joined the Xenex company in 2009 as CEO, he has expanded it to 30 employees and raised over $5 million from investors. And the machines are doing well too.

Each Xenex costs about $80,000, and the average hospital needs at least two to disinfect every room once a day. While this sounds expensive to the common man or college student, but a MRSA infection could cost upwards of $28,000 to treat, costs which the hospital would have to supply if the infection was caught there. Cone Health estimates a savings of at least $3 million with the addition of Xenex, making the devices extremely cost effective.

The best part is that doctors and nurses don't have to disrupt their normal routines, and cleaning can be done much faster. This will overall result in higher patient care and health. Job well done!

Wikipedia Blackout

Happy 2012! Intersession is in full swing here at Hopkins, and most of the STS team is back in action. There's a lot going on in our little Production Room, ranging from modeling projects to internal reorganization,and good progress is being made.

But enough about us for today. Tomorrow an unprecedented event is going to happen to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protecting Internet Protocol Act (PIPA) across major sites on the internet: a blackout. The internet is literally going out for 24 hours.

Leading the way towards this dark path is information mogul Wikipedia, which will suspend its English language services for all of Wednesday, January 18 (you will still be able to access Wikipedia in other languages). Most websites participating in this blackout will return a 503 HTTP error message when anyone goes to their site. This, according to various Google+ posts, pages, and updates from major organizations, will help the "STOP SOPA" movement in two ways: the content on the site will be noted as "not real" and therefore will not be indexed; and even with the same "site offline" message on all the URLs, it won't cause duplicate content issues.

Some of you may wonder how the Googlebot web crawler is going to respond to the drop in available information on the blackout day. Concerns for this are relatively low, since it's only one day (a relatively short time compared to the amount of time it has spent crawling already), and most people think the crawler's ability to reach a site like Wikipedia will remain as high as before the blackout, therefore able to recover quickly afterwards.

The internet is exploding with people across the country and the world protesting SOPA and PIPA. Twitter has introduced a #stopsopa tag, and anyone who is supporting the blackout can tag it at any time today or tomorrow. People are changing their pictures to Stop SOPA banners, posting on news sites about this act, and basically spreading their word and opinions as quickly and widely as they can.

Other giants are taking measures not as extreme as a blackout, but they are still protesting. Google will put out a doodle tomorrow to protest SOPA, and while Twitter says it would be "foolish" to shut down an international business site to protest the legislation of one nation, it too has spoken out against SOPA.

But for all of this frenzy, what is SOPA even about? Basically, it would allow the Justice Department to obtain an order to shut down a site suspected of piracy and make it all but vanish from the internet entirely. This obviously means sites that illegally post videos and music available for download will be shut down, but the major concerns against this are that it will allow the government to shut down legitimate sites that have free content. There is another clause, a DNS-blocking requirement, that would prevent computers from reaching overseas sites suspected of piracy. SOPA is the House of Representatives version of PIPA in the Senate, although both would meet the same end goals.

The supporters are mostly from Hollywood offices and record companies (MPAA/RIAA), who argue that by eliminating internet piracy, you are also eliminating the extra costs that go with it, which will overall reduce prices. The internet and technology advocates argue that it's too much government involvement in their businesses, and what's to stop people from breaking the system even if SOPA passes? Even top officials in Homeland Security think that clauses like the DNS-blocker will be a great blow to national security. The fear of the dangers of this act is real, and the government is sitting up and taking notice.

The White House officially took a stand against SOPA over the holiday break, mostly in response to what the people have been saying directly on the internet. (This is a perfect example of power deriving from the consent of the governed, no?) In the wake of so much opposition, Republicans and Democrats alike are backing out of support for these bills, or amending them to assuage the public. The legislation on SOPA has stalled until "outstanding concerns" have been addressed, but PIPA is still "alive and kicking," according to Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia.

This is the first time in a long time that many groups of people, from corporations to a teenager, have agreed on one thing and attacked it with full-force. With so many decrying SOPA and PIPA, it's a wonder that anyone can support it. There is a real chance this legislation will pass, and that will affect how the First Amendment rights are advocated for in courts of law and enforced in public for years to come.

Our nation is dependent on technology, and to pass SOPA would mean that everyone would lose. That's what Wikipedia and the rest of the internet are trying to prove.