30 July 2008
12:28:00 AM
We can always count on han yang and ben to ask questions. I shall address han yang 1st.
1. Basically, there are no steps to take note of. YES, YOU DID NOT READ WRONGLY! ITS REALLY SIMPLE. Mr Poh has already shown us how to do it in the practical lessons we had, so unless you weren't paying attention, you would have seen it. The important thing, is to have lots of practice (i've smeared maybe like more than a thousand slides already) and be comfortable with your own personal methods (when you get one cell thick smears at the end and the screener is able to screen the slide, no one really bothers how you do it). Just remember, always be relaxed and wear gloves to protect yourself from diseases. For the sake of preventing contamination, you might want to use another glass slide to smear instead of the spreader if you are smearing biohazardous blood.
To ensure that the slides are perfect for examination, ideally the smears would be 1 inch long (give and take). As we use a automated stainer, the smear would not be stained if it was too long (do not ask me why, this is how the machine was built). As i mentioned earlier, the back of the slide should be one cell thick, and there should be no obvious protruding tail.
2. Because hospitals usually use heparin as a treatment form while EDTA as an anticoagulant. And besides, heparin might interfere with the lab results.
3. You could try typing filaria in wiki or yahoo to get full information on it. Its a disease caused by parasitic thread like worms. Usually, these worms are transmitted by insect bites, especially those of the mosquito. The symptoms of the disease include elephantiasis, which causes the thickening of skin and underlying tissues.
Now for Mr Ben:
1. You can refer to malorie's post for more details on this part. She and I were posted to the same section and she has been in the routine lab for a month already. But don't worry, for your sake, I'll copy the name of every single machine in the lab and type it down here.
2. The smear is done manually. Sorry for not clarifying as I did not know of the existence of a spinner. As for checking whether its a good slide, please refer to the above.
cornelyus
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