NZ man aids millions with 15c water drip invention

Ray Avery's clamp simplifies administering drips. He believes it will save millions of children who die each year through dehydration. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

An Auckland man who picked up the torch when Third World eye doctor Fred Hollows died 10 years ago now has a new vision - saving the lives of millions of children who die each year through dehydration caused by diarrhoea and cholera.

Ray Avery, 57, is working with American designers and Auckland manufacturer Adept to make a 15c continuous water-drip device that can be operated by parents in countries which do not have enough nurses or doctors, let alone high-tech hospitals.

Existing devices require caregivers to manually adjust the flow of liquid from a plastic bag, and change the bag when it runs out.

"It's tricky. It's not intuitively obvious whether the thing is open or closed," Mr Avery said.

"So this [new device] can save a lot of lives, because the final product is something that you or I could use at the side of the road."

Mr Avery designed drug manufacturing facilities for Douglas Pharmaceuticals for nine years until 1992, met Fred Hollows a year later and has built factories for the Fred Hollows Foundation in Nepal and Eritrea, making lenses to replace eyes clouded with cataracts.

He has set up his own charity, Medicine Mondiale, to make medicines and medical devices available "to the poorest of the poor".

For nine months of the year, he lives in Auckland, where he also runs a consultancy designing pharmaceutical facilities.

For the other three months he works in Kathmandu.

As well as the water-drip device, he is seeking financial support for a research project at the Fred Hollows laboratory in Nepal, which aims to put a layer of atoms on new lenses to stop them being covered again by bacteria after cataract operations.

He also aims to raise $11.2 million to build another factory somewhere in the Third World to make cheap Aids drugs.

"The pharmaceutical companies are not into these sorts of things because there's no money in it," he said.

"We are saying, let's divert some of our intelligentsia to doing something that is going to be value for money.

"If you can save tens of thousands of lives with something that is costing 15c, that makes a lot more sense to me."

The original design for the water drip device came from a Boston non-profit group, Design That Matters.

The group approached Mr Avery because of his work in Nepal and Eritrea, and he and Adept have improved the design with "Kiwi No.8 wire mentality".

Adept managing director Murray Fenton said the company was giving its services free, and did not know whether it would end up making the device.