VN female scientist receives L’Oreal-UNESCO prize for nano silver research

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Dung has played a leading role in researching and finding a method to make silver nano, an important material used to health care and protection, which is in high demand in Vietnam.

In an interview with reporters, Dung said the deaths of four infants at Bac Ninh Hospital of Obstetrics and Paediatrics in the northern province of Bac Ninh Province in November 2017 was due to septic shock. 

Dr Tran Ngoc Dung. (Photo: Vietnamnet)

A nano-silver covered air filtration membrane would have helped filter the air and prevent microorganisms from entering treatment rooms.

In August 2017 eight out of every 10 patients hospitalized suffered from hemorrhagic dengue fever during an outbreak, she found after visiting a hospital in Hanoi.

At the time, she used a silver nano solution to spray on a mosquito bite on her hand and discovered 20 minutes later that the mosquito bite had disappeared. 

Currently, she is coordinating with the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology to evaluate the effectiveness of this type of solution.

In 2006, when carrying out research under the protocol between Vietnam and the Russia Federation governments on making silver nanoparticles, Dung and her colleagues found that the Reverse Micelles method could produce silver nanoparticles of good quality but were not suitable to Vietnam conditions.

The preparation process has many complicated phases, takes time and requires expensive chemicals, thus leading to high production costs. Dung believes this method should not be used to make nano silver on a large scale.

With the support of a US professor, Dung decided to use an aqueous solution to dissolve silver salts and use a dispersant that produces silver particles. And the result was encouraging: the silver particles were small and similar to nano silver materials.

Dung brought the material she created to the Chemistry Institute of the Vietnam Academy of Science & Technology to have it analyzed. 

She was informed that the silver nanoparticles created with this new method were less than 100 nanometers in size, which meets the standards recognized as nanomaterials.

Five Vietnamese female scientists were granted the 2017 L'Oreal-UNESCO awards at a ceremony in Ha Noi on January 12. 

Associate Prof Dr Nguyen Thi Hoai, Dean of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine under the Hue University of Medicine and Pharmacy; and Dr Tran Thi Ngoc Dung, head of the Department for Environmentally Friendly Technology of the Institute of Environment Technology under the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology won the L'Oreal-UNESCO Award for Women in Science.

Three young female scientists received the L’Oreal National Fellowship for Women in Science.

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