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Ultrasound can push vaccines into the body without needles (www.newscientist.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

269 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Vaccines can be delivered through the skin using ultrasound. This method doesn’t damage the skin and eliminates the need for painful needles. To create a needle-free vaccine, Darcy Dunn-Lawless at the University of Oxford and his colleagues mixed vaccine molecules with tiny, cup-shaped proteins. They then applied liquid mixture to the skin of mice and exposed it to ultrasound – like that used for sonograms – for about a minute and a half.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Sweet, now they can charge me $1k for a shot and not use a needle.

Last time I got an ultrasound the hospital charged me $2k. Wanted to confirm nothing was wrong with my kidneys. Turns out I was all good, but now I have an expensive bill to deal with...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

$2k is largely the doctors time for the procedure, plus interpretation (sometimes another doctor entirely, particularly when multiple opinions are warranted).

Of course, the equipment probably isn't cheap either

Edit - damn. Looks like I was very wrong on this one!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

90-95% of imaging cost is the technical fee. An ultrasound is usually 0.5 to 1.0 RVUs roughly. So let's say 1. The RVU rate for radiologists right now is around $45-60 an RVU. So of the $2k for the ultrasound, a Radiologist will make about $50 of it.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

In my recent experience, that wasn’t the case. Ultrasound at the ER was $370 for the contracted radiologist. And a whipping $1700 for a 5 minute use of the machine.