Sterile air wound bandage.

This is an offshoot of Controlled Environment Therapy.

The basic concept is thus: Replace antibiotics and wound dressings with an enclosed sterile air environment. By controlling the temperature and replacement rate of the sterile air, an environment can be created and maintained which is hostile to pathogenic bacteria and accelerates the normal process of wound healing. In most cases, in a person with a normally functioning immune system, in the absence of exogenous sources of bacteria, the body’s immune system can effectively deal with the remaining “resident” pathogens.

Back in the ‘90s I consulted for an ill fated start-up company which took this concept tantalizingly close to a marketable reality only to stumble into the morass of ego/control/greed deconstruction.

Before it faded into oblivion, this company did produce some operational prototype equipment which enabled a few dramatic implementations at Vancouver General Hospital. The three that lodged in my brain were: A woman who had been doused with gasoline and had essentially equivalent burns to both legs—one leg received conventional antibiotic and wound dressing, the other, a sterile air wound bandage. The leg treated with sterile air healed at about twice the rate of the conventional dressing. Another was a diabetic patient with a foot ulcer which was slated for amputation. The sterile air bandage allowed the wound to heal and saved the foot. A child had a severe burn—his screams could be heard throughout the ward at bandage changing time (twice a day as I recall). His parents found out about the sterile air system and begged the researchers to try it on their son—end of screaming.

Yes, this is one of those technologies which is obviously capable of relieving human suffering, reducing hospitalization time and costs dramatically (for certain types of wounds), and reducing the use of and reliance on already overused antibiotics.

You might wonder, “Why didn’t some well heeled multinational health care company jump on this and take it to completion? The answer is only too simple—the underlying concepts have been in the public domain since the ‘60s—there’s no reasonable likelihood of securing a conceptual patent that would protect the level of generous profits required by the established (industry) players.

Since I haven’t stumbled across any “brousable” references to this technology, I thought that I should run something on my website to put the concept into cyberspace in the hope that someone somewhere might derive some benefit from it.

Before I get into the details of how to “roll your own”, I need to put a plug in for Canada—in the U.S., the FDA places monstrous “front end” cost barriers in the path of anyone thinking of developing a new health care modality. In Canada, for equipment of this type, you only have to demonstrate that it’s non-lethal before you can implement clinical trials under the supervision of medical doctors.

So now, if one was to put together such a device (to be used on your pet, for instance), just how would you go about it? To be continued…