to experience what I’m going to talk
about may I ask a few volunteers to take
in a deep breath breathe out that nice
feeling you’ve just had is because you
just pushed additional oxygen into your
system walking in a rural hospital and
the shores of Lake Victoria in western
Kenya we had an interesting economy
called Pierre W it did not mean the
prisoner of war but meant a pediatrics
observation ward but it felt more like a
battlefield because this is the place
where man fought disease every day and I
often felt like a true prisoner of war
every time I lost a baby to severe
pneumonia with each death I lost a piece
of my heart and it happened so
frequently one day in our usual routine
duties we had a baby with severe
pneumonia together with my team we had
battled to save him his name was Moses
nine month old baby very bubbly as Moses
was beginning to feel better another
baby showed up but remember Moses was
hooked to our only available oxygen
cylinder in the unit because this other
baby
was too sick and if we didn’t give
oxygen immediately she would suddenly
die we disconnected Moses to give oxygen
to this other baby it was a cold season
and pneumonia cases were on the rise
Moses survived but not without some
brain damage he lives today with
blindness and a bit of hearing loss he’s
one of the lucky few to survive over the
last almost 20 years have observed so
many children
died because of lack of oxygen an
element that is so common but we are not
able to provide it waste needed most
it’s not just in Kenya this is a common
problem across the developing world for
those who follow the news you may have
read something earlier in August when
more than 90 children died in a hospital
in India allegedly because the vendor
who supplied that hospital with oxygen
had cut off supplies because of
non-payment of bills now oxygen is
pretty abundant in the air is the third
most common element and forms 21% of our
atmosphere but when children like Moses
are too sick they are not able to get
the oxygen they need from the air they
need supplemental oxygen from the
cylinders and other sources now
currently when you look at the world in
places like the United States oxygen is
plentiful in hospitals it’s all over the
walls when you walk into any hospitals
it’s available in frozen tongues where
it flows freely to where it’s needed but
this approach is too expensive for the
developing countries to afford I’ll show
you what you will see in most of most of
our countries you will see something
like this oxygen is often supplied using
the cylinders and when you track one of
these cylinders currently you will
realize that it’s filled some 1000
kilometers away and moved over time to
the facilities where it’s needed so this
because of the transportation and the
inefficient systems they are in it’s
also fairly expensive for for those
settings but the time it gets to the
patient is fairly expensive now one
would ask for those who know the
technology and the oxygen space why
can’t I use
generators they used fairly often but
they need electricity I remember a few
years back and many of you can remember
when there was a power outage in New
York City I was visiting my mom then and
there was a really hilarious story of a
family that was trying to light their
dinner table from the headlight of an
SUV and she was quite shocked and saying
but don’t these people have candles I
said mama
they have candles but mainly for
romantic dinners they were never thought
of them as something that he uses a
backup source of lighting because maybe
this was the first time this was
happening now in my hospital during the
rainy season two things happened every
day we were sure that would get a child
with pneumonia and there would be a
power outage so if you’re relying on the
concentrator then it won’t work when you
need it most
so there’s a solution that you can use
it’s something like this
it’s a pressure swing adsorption
technology this technology harnesses
oxygen from the air we breathe and can
fill it into this cylinder that you see
at 2,000 bars once you fill it there at
2,000 bars you can actually direct it to
patients even if there’s no electricity
one task this technology has been with
us for from the 70s how comes we’ve not
been using it as required it’s fairly
expensive if each Hospital tries to set
it up for themselves and also very
difficult to maintain so but if you
organize it in a way that a number of
hospitals share it then it becomes
affordable and a very good source of
oxygen in resource-limited settings to
address the problems that I’ve faced as
a hospital administrator I founded a
company called Hera tele it deploys this
technology to produce oxygen close to
it’s needed most
we produce it within the district and we
have a distribution channel that goes
for approximately a radius of 100 miles
and we serve approximately a hundred
health facilities from one plant
it’s a milkman distribution model and we
find that makes it really cheap and
affordable for these cell facilities and
we can have uninterrupted supply
throughout the year whether it’s raining
or not now in 2017 the World Health
Organization had a major policy change
that now classifies oxygen as an
essential medicine for treatment of sick
children I think this is an important
direction because they’ve had a similar
policy which only classified it for
other uses for 30 years and so this
gives us an opportunity to work with
governments to supply oxygen where it’s
needed most my approach is to structure
this in a public-private partnership
model it transfers the risk of oxygen
supplies from the government and their
facilities to a local operator that is
competent and able to run it effectively
throughout the year there are many other
players working in this space to develop
solar solutions for more resilient
concentrators to develop pulse oximetry
and to develop many other things around
oxygen and I think together if all these
things come together then we will be
able to avoid the deaths that we saw in
India earlier in the year or the tens of
thousands that go unreported each year
because of lack of a simple element like
oxygen I look forward to the day when
doctors will not have to choose which
baby’s life to save thank you very much [Music]
about may I ask a few volunteers to take
in a deep breath breathe out that nice
feeling you’ve just had is because you
just pushed additional oxygen into your
system walking in a rural hospital and
the shores of Lake Victoria in western
Kenya we had an interesting economy
called Pierre W it did not mean the
prisoner of war but meant a pediatrics
observation ward but it felt more like a
battlefield because this is the place
where man fought disease every day and I
often felt like a true prisoner of war
every time I lost a baby to severe
pneumonia with each death I lost a piece
of my heart and it happened so
frequently one day in our usual routine
duties we had a baby with severe
pneumonia together with my team we had
battled to save him his name was Moses
nine month old baby very bubbly as Moses
was beginning to feel better another
baby showed up but remember Moses was
hooked to our only available oxygen
cylinder in the unit because this other
baby
was too sick and if we didn’t give
oxygen immediately she would suddenly
die we disconnected Moses to give oxygen
to this other baby it was a cold season
and pneumonia cases were on the rise
Moses survived but not without some
brain damage he lives today with
blindness and a bit of hearing loss he’s
one of the lucky few to survive over the
last almost 20 years have observed so
many children
died because of lack of oxygen an
element that is so common but we are not
able to provide it waste needed most
it’s not just in Kenya this is a common
problem across the developing world for
those who follow the news you may have
read something earlier in August when
more than 90 children died in a hospital
in India allegedly because the vendor
who supplied that hospital with oxygen
had cut off supplies because of
non-payment of bills now oxygen is
pretty abundant in the air is the third
most common element and forms 21% of our
atmosphere but when children like Moses
are too sick they are not able to get
the oxygen they need from the air they
need supplemental oxygen from the
cylinders and other sources now
currently when you look at the world in
places like the United States oxygen is
plentiful in hospitals it’s all over the
walls when you walk into any hospitals
it’s available in frozen tongues where
it flows freely to where it’s needed but
this approach is too expensive for the
developing countries to afford I’ll show
you what you will see in most of most of
our countries you will see something
like this oxygen is often supplied using
the cylinders and when you track one of
these cylinders currently you will
realize that it’s filled some 1000
kilometers away and moved over time to
the facilities where it’s needed so this
because of the transportation and the
inefficient systems they are in it’s
also fairly expensive for for those
settings but the time it gets to the
patient is fairly expensive now one
would ask for those who know the
technology and the oxygen space why
can’t I use
generators they used fairly often but
they need electricity I remember a few
years back and many of you can remember
when there was a power outage in New
York City I was visiting my mom then and
there was a really hilarious story of a
family that was trying to light their
dinner table from the headlight of an
SUV and she was quite shocked and saying
but don’t these people have candles I
said mama
they have candles but mainly for
romantic dinners they were never thought
of them as something that he uses a
backup source of lighting because maybe
this was the first time this was
happening now in my hospital during the
rainy season two things happened every
day we were sure that would get a child
with pneumonia and there would be a
power outage so if you’re relying on the
concentrator then it won’t work when you
need it most
so there’s a solution that you can use
it’s something like this
it’s a pressure swing adsorption
technology this technology harnesses
oxygen from the air we breathe and can
fill it into this cylinder that you see
at 2,000 bars once you fill it there at
2,000 bars you can actually direct it to
patients even if there’s no electricity
one task this technology has been with
us for from the 70s how comes we’ve not
been using it as required it’s fairly
expensive if each Hospital tries to set
it up for themselves and also very
difficult to maintain so but if you
organize it in a way that a number of
hospitals share it then it becomes
affordable and a very good source of
oxygen in resource-limited settings to
address the problems that I’ve faced as
a hospital administrator I founded a
company called Hera tele it deploys this
technology to produce oxygen close to
it’s needed most
we produce it within the district and we
have a distribution channel that goes
for approximately a radius of 100 miles
and we serve approximately a hundred
health facilities from one plant
it’s a milkman distribution model and we
find that makes it really cheap and
affordable for these cell facilities and
we can have uninterrupted supply
throughout the year whether it’s raining
or not now in 2017 the World Health
Organization had a major policy change
that now classifies oxygen as an
essential medicine for treatment of sick
children I think this is an important
direction because they’ve had a similar
policy which only classified it for
other uses for 30 years and so this
gives us an opportunity to work with
governments to supply oxygen where it’s
needed most my approach is to structure
this in a public-private partnership
model it transfers the risk of oxygen
supplies from the government and their
facilities to a local operator that is
competent and able to run it effectively
throughout the year there are many other
players working in this space to develop
solar solutions for more resilient
concentrators to develop pulse oximetry
and to develop many other things around
oxygen and I think together if all these
things come together then we will be
able to avoid the deaths that we saw in
India earlier in the year or the tens of
thousands that go unreported each year
because of lack of a simple element like
oxygen I look forward to the day when
doctors will not have to choose which
baby’s life to save thank you very much [Music]
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