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A team of Australian scientists has developed a life-saving oxygen supply machine that can treat young pneumonia patients even in the middle of power blackouts.
The doctors and physicists from the University of Melbourne created the machine, known as LPOS, to help treat sufferers in developing countries where power cuts are common.
Pneumonia is the No.1 killer of children aged under five worldwide, causing nearly one and a half million deaths a year, which equates to one child every 30 seconds.
Despite the use of antibiotics, children can die without a steady flow of purified oxygen - their underdeveloped lungs struggle to cope and the condition often becomes fatal.
But LPOS stores oxygen at low-pressure to ensure steady supply when electricity fails. It has potential to reduce child pneumonia mortality rates in developing by up to 30 percent.
The team from Melbourne will travel to Uganda in August to test the machine in local medical clinics.
The University of Melbourne's Faculty of Science Physicist Roger Rassool said the LPOS machine would be extremely useful in developing countries where blackouts are common.
"In these basic health clinics, doctors commonly use an oxygen concentrator machine, which uses electricity to produce oxygen," he said in a statement on Wednesday.
"The air we breathe is 78 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen. This machine removes the nitrogen from the air and increases the concentration of oxygen to 90 percent." Enditem
