Here are some alarming statistics: Cervical cancer every year kills nearly 300,000 people, 85% of whom live in developing countries. Despite these large numbers, cervical cancer is easily preventable with the help of a colposcope, a device that helps doctors get a magnified view of a woman’s cervix. The only problem? Women in low-income parts of the world have limited access to health clinics that carry this tool.
Luckily, one start-up is working to change all that. The Israel-based company, MobileODT, has invented a device that works much like a traditional colposcope, only it’s much smaller and attaches to a physician’s smartphone. Using this tool, it takes doctors just a few minutes to take a photo of a patient’s cervix and then observe the image more closely for visible deformities. The device even has settings to adjust lighting, reduce glare, and magnify an image up to 16 times.
While a standard colposcope can cost more than $10,000, medical professionals can snag MobileODT’s iPhone-compatible tool for a cool $1,800. The startup’s CEO, Ariel Beery, told Huffington Post that while billions of people are “buying phones and buying minutes for their phones for banking, commerce, and learning, the one thing they can’t do is use them for the most important thing in life, which is saving their life and the lives of loved ones.”
Since the company released the devices in 2014, doctors have used them to screen more than 16,000 women in 26 countries around the world. Pending the FDA’s approval, the device could be useful in American communities as well. Because the device gives doctors instant results from an image instead of waiting weeks for pap smear results, patients can get treatment for problems sooner.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.