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My name is Sean Monagle. I'm a project engineer for Jhpiego. I've
been working here at Jhpiego for about two years on the antenatal screening kit
project
which consists of the protein pen screening tests. What we're doing is
trying to develop a screening test to detect protein in urine which is one
of the symptoms of pre-eclampsia in pregnant women, the importance of which is
detecting pre-eclampsia as one of the highest causes morbidity and
mortality in developing countries for pregnant women.
So community health workers that travel village to village in developing
countries generally visit pregnant women in their homes to check up on them.
However, currently they don't have any method to screen these women for
potential complications,
but using our test, they will be able to, and this is how it works:
a community health worker can simply take our pen,
mark on a piece of paper and then let that test strip dry.
Once it's dried, she can give it to the pregnant women who voids on it like a
pregnancy test and if the color changes that indicates positive for
protien in the urine which is a symptom of pre-eclampsia.
So when we were field testing the protein pen in
Mangalbari, Nepal
and it was really exciting just
watching health workers make test strips with our pen as well as actually
watching pregnant women use our test to screen themselves
for pre-eclampsia.
It was actually a pretty amazing experience. In Mangalbari, we were
getting about sixty to seventy
women coming to the health clinic every day, but about two weeks into the study
there was an anomaly where about a hundred to a hundred and twenty women showed up.
And we are really confused as to why so many women showed up all at once,
and the researchers actually started interviewing some of these pregnant women.
and they found out that a lot of these pregnant women
came early to the clinic, and the reason they came was because they
had heard about
the protein test being offered at this clinic
which was very amazing to me. I mean these women in the rural areas of Nepal
who live on a very low income
were actually talking to each other and the community and actually getting
excited about the protein test, and actually came to the health clinic
specifically just to get our test.
So thanks for watching this video on our protein screening tests.
It's a really exciting project, and it's been a lot of fun to work on. Hopefully
with our new test we'll be able to deliver more cost effective and more
accurate screening for protein in the urine to help women who could be at
risk for pre-eclampsia in low resource settings. We're really excited about this
project and hopefully will be able to market this shortly.