Musical instrument goes flat in presence of adulterated medicine

Enlarge / A mbira-the researchers removed all the tines and placed a single loop of metallic tubing in their place. (credit: Joanna Bourne)

Even without the rise of online pharmacies, there have been multiple food and medicine adulteration cases, some due to carelessness, some due to greed. One unfortunate part of the story is that most cases of adulteration are pretty clumsy, and lives could have been saved if we had simple and widely available tests for contaminants.

That is precisely what a team of engineers has recently tried to achieve. They have taken some pretty old ideas and rejigged them to create a rather innovative testing system that can detect adulteration in liquid medicines and maybe even food.

The challenge with making a generic test for contamination is that all sorts of things can end up in food and medicine. The key to this new idea is that you don't necessarily need to know what has been added, only that it is different from the standard formulation. In almost all cases, changing the formulation changes the density of a liquid. A sensitive mass sensor, then, should be able to detect medicines that have not been produced properly.

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