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By co-founding MTTS, Nga Tuyet Trang is bringing life-saving technology to Vietnamese hospitals, allowing them to reduce infant mortality.
Nga Tuyet Trang grew up in post-war Vietnam, where there was a shortage of everything, including healthcare. She wanted to make things better, and though she had ideas, she had no resources.
When she got a scholarship to study in Denmark, she took it. She came back to Vietnam, and started working in Hanoi, for a U.S.-based medical organization in Hanoi that connected local doctors and foreign health care equipment designers. As part of her job, she often visited hospitals, and the huge gap between Denmark and Vietnam in the quality of the facilities and healthcare bothered her.
One day she witnessed the heartbreaking sight of a newborn baby dying, because it could not breathe. Its life could have easily been saved, if the hospital had the right equipment. Nga Tuyet Trang made it her life’s work to make sure that such tragedies no longer happen.
She set up MTTS (Medical Technology Transfer and Services ) along with a few friends, in partnership with California based East Meets West Foundation, that helped with the R&D. MTTS designs, manufactures and distributes appropriate medical equipment for neonatal intensive care, especially for low resource settings, like Vietnamese hospitals.
Many people tried to stop her. “Everybody kept saying that nothing could be done without the money. Denmark is the way it is because they are rich, they were pointing out. Well, we have to start somewhere, I replied,” she says.
The machines MTTS makes are revolutionary because they are low cost, designed specifically to be used in places that do not have many resources and can be easily operated even without much training. This is achieved in the following ways:
A news report (watch video below) shows just how much impact these machines have had. As of 2017, MTTS had delivered over 3,200 devices, and has saved the lives of 1.4 million babies, including 105,000 in 2017 alone.
For this truly inspiring work, MTTS and Trang were awarded “Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2017” by Schwab Foundation.
According to recent statistics by WHO, 6.3 million children under the age of 15 years died in 2017. 5.4 million of them were under the age of 5 and 2.5 million of those children died within the first month of life. Most of these deaths are caused by lack of access to simple, affordable interventions. Through MTTS, Nga Tuyet Trang is making a difference, one child and one machine at a time.
The theme of International Women’s Day, 2019, which falls on March 8th, is “Think equal, build smart, innovate for change”. #IWD2019
With women still a minority in science, technology & related innovation, it’s time to shine a spotlight on female innovation champions! Enjoy our Women Innovators Around The World series, where we profile 19 inspiring women innovators, from 19 countries, whose work has a big social impact.
Want to know what other innovations women around the world have pioneered? Read about Yanina Taneva here.
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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