Hello, everyone!

While Lydia is the person I know best at the Agency right now, it’s really obvious that we’ve got an amazing mix of skills and knowledge floating around among the team.

I was thinking about the recent business down in Buenos Aires, particularly the little girl with the broken wrists, and had an idea:  chemosensitive cast wraps which change color when bone healing is complete.

Now, on our planet, in humans, there are localized chemical changes in the area of a bone break.  In the short term, there is an increase in the density of cytokines – those are sort of chemical 911 sent out by the body to increase blood flow and speed delivery of nutrients and other chemicals to the area.  To use an analogy, this is like knowing there is an emergency in that building over there because you see, first, lots of emergency vehicles, and later, busy people wearing uniforms.

More with the metaphor.  Later, during most of bone healing, there are a smaller population of people with uniforms.  They’re not even, reliably, the same uniforms all the time.  The metaphorical ambulances have long, long since left.  However, due to the steady influx of construction materials, and construction waste, the dumpster near the building stays pretty reliably full.  Not always full of the same stuff, but fairly steady output.  You can judge a lot about how things are going by the frequency and size of the dump trucks.

Now, in the non-metaphorical world, the chemistry of the skin over the break, at least on limbs, is subtly but detectably different than the skin over an intact area of bone.

Imagine a cast wrap which, when that chemical difference disappears, changes color, thus indicating it is safe to remove the cast.

It is unlikely this technology would fly in the U.S. – pediatric orthopaedic lawsuits would likely see to that.  However, in much of the second and third world, imaging technology, even xray, is thin on the ground, and expensive.  I believe it would be quite possible to sell UNICEF and the International Cross and Crescent on a material outlay for cast wraps which would directly decrease imaging costs and indirectly decrease the likelihood of lifelong crippling injuries due to poorly healed bones.

Any of you with special senses:  would you willing to work with me assessing a population of patients with healed and not quite healed broken bones to a) narrow down one consistent chemical marker present in healing bone that resolves upon bone healing, and b) to help me create a chemical using only St. James materials that changes color in the presence of trace amounts of that chemical that I can use the treat the cast wraps?

Give me that chemical, and the rest is up to persuasion, stubbornness, and engineering.