A research team from National Yang Ming University and Taipei Veterans General Hospital yesterday introduced an invention they said would help increase the accuracy and safety of epidural anesthesia — an epidural needle with a high-frequency ultrasound transducer embedded in it.
The leader of the National Science Council-funded project — Chiang Hui-hua (江惠華), a professor at the university’s Department of Biomedical Engineering — said epidural anesthesia is often used to reduce pain in labor, for lower body surgery and for postoperative pain relief.
Epidural anesthesia is used in about 40,000 deliveries in Taiwan and million of deliveries worldwide annually, she said, adding that the team believes its invention can improve the process of giving epidurals, helping both anesthetists and less-experienced doctors.
An epidural is given by inserting a long epidural needle through the bones in a patient’s spine, through the ligaments and into the epidural space. A lumbar epidural catheter is then inserted into the body to deliver the anesthesia. Anesthetists and doctors have traditionally located the epidural space, which is only about 2mm to 7mm thick, by manual touch.
“It [the procedure] has been described as piercing through darkness,” she said, adding that anesthetists and doctors sometimes have difficulty finding the epidural space accurately because of the physical differences in people’s bodies.
Ting Chien-kun (丁乾坤), an anesthesiologist at the hospital, said the risk of failure in giving an epidural is not particularly high, but in about 1 percent to 3 percent of the cases, the epidural needle goes in too far, causing cerebrospinal fluid leak out into the epidural space, which can cause a post-dural puncture headache.
Describing their creation as the “eyes of the needle,” the team said the invention can help practitioners determine the location of the needle by monitoring signals emitted by the transducer.
Having conducted tests on pigs, the team hopes the new needle can be used in human clinical trials as soon as next year, after they are granted a patent for it.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,