WASHINGTON — Recycling might be the key to the future of controlling epidemics.
An idea from a team at the Baylor College of Medicine, the Emergency Smart Pod, a mobile, eight-bed clinic built out of a used shipping container, won a grant in a U.S. Agency for International Development competition Feb. 11.
The ESP, as the pod is known, can be built quickly and deployed immediately to any disease-stricken area in the world.
President Barack Obama had challenged USAID to find new methods to combat the Ebola outbreak. The agency received more than 1,500 grant applications that aimed to take on the problem. Baylor was one of 12 grant recipients.
Sharmila Anandasabapathy, director of Baylor Global Initiatives and the Baylor Global Innovation Center emphasized both the time and cost efficiency of the ESP.
"Compared to a stand-alone hospital, you're talking two weeks [for it to be deployed] as opposed to potentially nine to 12 months," Anandasabapathy said. "For cost, I think it would be between 1/10th and 1/20th the cost, depending on the facility."
Each ESP medical unit will be equipped with eight beds, an air filtration system, air conditioning and a contained waste management system. It will also come with a set of clinical training apps that would show how to properly use the ESP. Once a request to deploy an ESP comes in, a team could have it in the field and operating in two weeks.
"Like Legos, you can put multiple containers together so you can go from an eight-bed unit to a 16-bed unit very quickly," Anandasabapthy said. 'You can develop individual units for waste management that can be attached to larger units, but we hope that at full scale, we could build a 100-bed hospital in a month."
USAID will provide funds to create a prototype, which the Baylor team hopes to have completed by the end of the spring, Anandasabapathy said.
Baylor has requested $850,501 to fund the prototype, but the actual amount awarded by USAID is still to be determined.
"This pod could potentially change thousands of lives," said Sarah Michel, senior project manager for Baylor Global Initiatives. "The intention is for any sort of epidemic or natural disaster that the pod would be shipped out and care for individuals immediately."
Though they were developed to quell the Ebola outbreak, ESPs will be able to deal with other epidemics, or even natural disasters. Anandasabapthy noted that the pods could be adapted to use solar panels, allowing them to operate off the electric grid.
"Once this epidemic is over, there may be other epidemics and other clinical diseases that may become relevant in the future," Anandasabapthy said. "We saw that these units could be adapted to other clinical diseases, so there's potential beyond the current Ebola outbreak."
Biologics Modular, based in Brownsburg, Ind., will build the first ESP.
"It could be Ebola, but even more importantly, it could be a tsunami or a natural disaster, a hurricane, an earthquake," Anandasabapathy said. "You need rapid medical capacity and you need it in areas that don't have power or infrastructure. So, you can use it in remote regions without capacity and you can use it to augment capacity in urban areas during natural disasters."
