Mukherjee 1

Isha Mukherjee

Mr. Speice

ISM I

24 March 2021

Assessing My Progress

Assessment 17 - Product Progress Assessment

Assessment

To accurately assess the status of my project I will evaluate my time management, depth

of content, and future plans. My best point of reference is my original work, during which I

learned a lot about what I should and should not do the second time around.

During my original work, I learned the hard way the necessity of proper time

management. Having never done a semester project, I could not imagine what the completed

project would look like, causing the process to be more time-consuming than anticipated. This

semester I fixed this issue by committing to a project that I knew I could complete, having a

thorough idea of what the end product will look like, and working a little bit each day. However,

with my busy schedule, some weeks I could not find time to devote to my product, daily, but in

an effort to take accountability I have gotten into a regimen of making up the time lost over the

weekend. Although this is not ideal, I have seen a lot more productivity when I work for two or

three hours at a time rather than in small minute increments because with the latter, I tend to stop

working mid-thought. Overall, I have been much more efficient with my time which has allowed

me to easily commit to a more difficult project and be near completion far before the deadline.

As for the status of my product, I am a week from being completely done with all the

research. I learned from last semester that the assembly process takes just as much time as
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researching, so I have allotted myself an entire month to put everything together. This gives me

buffer room to experiment with display designs and do any last minute research.

The first thing I did to set the foundation for my project was calculate how much funding

I need for my TB treatment plan: at least $1 billion but ideally $3 billion. I calculated this

number by first finding South Africa's population size. Then I found that the CDC recommends

that everyone gets tested for TB at least once a year in densely populated and highly infected

areas, such as South Africa. With this information and the price of TB tests, I determined that it

would cost the South African government $178.86 million to purchase a test for all their

residents, for one year. Then I calculated how much it would cost to purchase the BCG vaccine.

The BCG vaccine is a highly effective preventative TB vaccine for children, so I multiplied the

cost of the vaccine with the annual number of newborns in South Africa and found that

purchasing the BCG vaccine for every newborn would cost $1.7 million. Both these expenses

combined are the cost of preventative medical care. It is important to keep in mind that when

governments buy medical products they receive a significant discount due to the nature of bulk

purchases, so the above numbers will be approximately 25% lower in reality. Also, there are

some limitations to my calculations because they suggest that a person can only get tested once a

year and that only newborns will receive the BCG vaccine, but this is where we have to analyze

statistics. Trends have shown that many residents of South Africa often do not follow through on

the recommended treatment/preventative measures. Therefore, it is safe to assume that many

tests will be available for those who require testing more than once a year. Also, my plan looks to

the future, therefore I am only funding BCG for newborns. Herd immunity will protect

unvaccinated children.
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Looking back at my research I then calculated the cost of treatment. Treatment for

different types of TB (MDR, non-MDR, and latent) costs different amounts of money, so I

multiplied each respective cost with the approximate number of yearly cases of each type. Doing

this I found that MDR TB costs $238 million to treat, non-MDR costs $367.625 million, and

latent costs $69.2 million. This is important because notice how latent TB, an asymptomatic TB

infection that may turn into the disease, is much cheaper to treat and it has a higher survival rate.

It is estimated that 88% of the population has latent TB. Ideally, TB education will become

profound enough to where more people are consistently getting tested, which will increase the

government's expenses in that regard, but the increase will be made up by fewer people falling ill

because they were diagnosed in the latent TB stage, lower treatment expenses. Finally, when I

added together the preventative treatment costs and treatment costs, I determined that the

medical aspect of my funding will require $855 million.

The next perspective covered in my funding is non-medical preventative care. The heavy

emphasis on preventative care is because TB is rapidly mutating and researchers lack the

infrastructure to continuously chase after a cure, so it is more productive to allocate money

towards preventative care. The main non-preventative medical care I looked into are masks. I

researched the various types of masks (respirators, surgical, cloth, biodegradable, self-cleaning)

and evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of each. Conditions in South Africa are very

different from the US, so the ideal masks need to be long lasting, highly effective, realistically

priced, self cleaning, and/or biodegradable. I identified the above criteria by looking into the

living conditions in South Africa. The thing that stood out to me most was the high transmission

rates of diseases through the recycling of medical supplies. A large percentage of HIV cases are

due to medical facilities reusing needles and many needles lying in the streets where people can
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take, use, or mistakenly step on. If masks become a readily used part of day-to-day life, then

trends suggest that many may be prompted to reuse the masks they find lying around. This poses

an issue if the previous owner of the mask had TB. Biodegradable masks would help prevent this

issue. Likewise, due to the lack of water treatment in many parts of South Africa, if a TB patient

washes their infected mask, then the disposed water may be consumed. To combat this issue, I

propose self-cleaning masks using nanotechnology or portable water treatment.

The final perspective of my funding is education. More people need to be educated about

the severity of TB and ways to prevent it, but that is not something my product is focusing on.

Instead, with my mentor's help, I will be creating resources for researchers abroad to use when

applying for grants. My mentor spoke about how researchers in South Africa are struggling to

receive grants that will help them fund TB research. This is because they are not educated on

how to write a thorough compelling proposal. With my mentor's guidance, I will create an

infographic on what grant distributors are looking for.

I have made significant progress on my project, but I do have a few more things to

complete. By March 31st I will determine which mask is best for South Africa's conditions and

calculate how much it would cost to provide every resident with a mask. Then I will research the

various water treatment options and determine which one has the perfect balance of affordability

and efficiency. I will calculate how much it would cost if every household received the

recommended number of water treatment units to last them one year. If money is leftover in my

proposed funding, $3 billion, I will determine what can be done with the remaining funding:

ventilation systems, single use needles, and/or healthcare for the poor. Looking at how long it

took me to finish other parts of my product, I am certain that I can complete everything above in
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a week, especially since I have already completed the major aspects of these tasks. That leaves

me with an entire month to aesthetically, yet professionally, piece together all my work.

My product is very close to completion which is an apparent improvement from last

semester. This time last semester I was still in the early stages of research. I am impressed by my

quality of work because I have not been able to rely heavily on the internet, which prompts

deeper level thinking and incites greater satisfaction in the completed product.

Notes

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