DANIELLE ZUROVCIK

CAMBRIDGE, MA – One MIT student has made an incredible medical advancement that almost anyone can afford!
Massachusetts Institute of Technology is known for producing great minds and innovators. Danielle Zurovcik is keeping with the trend and has created a simple pump that could revolutionize medical care. The device, costing a whopping $3, could be crucial from disaster relief effort to day-to-day operations in any hospital.
Zurovcik’s pump, which uses negative pressure to pull bacteria and fluid out of wounds, was the crowning achievement for her master’s degree thesis project.
“I was walking through Kmart and saw a row of plungers,” she told AOL News. “I just thought, ‘Wow, that’s exactly what I can use.”
A month after her revelation, Zurovcik designed and built a simple device that uses a bellows pump, a plastic tubing and a fitting to enclose a wound. The creation is more or less a watered down version of a commercial negative-pressure pump, which is already a staple in American hospitals to treat bed sores and quicken burn relief.
Zurovcik’s device is everything anyone could ask for – cost-effective, lightweight and minimal energy is needed to operate it. Users press the hand pump and that’s about all she wrote. That’s all it takes to initiate the negative pressure, which then pulls impurities out of the wound and sends blood to the damaged area.
“To basically take a toilet plunger and produce negative pressure over a prolonged period of time, that is really great,” Kristian Olson, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, told MIT’s Technology Review. “Not only do I see it answering this need in developing countries, I think it could really enhance home therapy for chronic wounds in the U.S.”