I have been cleaning the slides in the dishwasher. Perhaps it leaves a residue of wetting agent?

Is there a way to test my Giemsa to make sure it has not been contaminated?

thanks again.

Please rest assured that I am not using home diagnostics. I am seeing a team of haematologists and am not having treatment yet. However I am naturally curious and have done a great deal of research around the subject. My PhD is in physics but I am reasonably quick to assimilate new subjects. But it ...

thanks, Bill. Your experience is obviously valuable. "small drop of blood near one end of the slide and then use another slide to make the smear. Place the second slide at about a 30 degree angle to the smear slide with the edge just ahead of the drop. Then back up the second slide until it just tou...

Thanks to both respondents.

There is work to be done to try out these ideas.

I once used a pipette, that had been used for water, to draw Giemsa from the bottle. Is it possible that the traces of water have contaminated the Giemsa? How sensitive is it to water contamination?

I will report back.

I tried a number of variations of the basic technique of air dry blood smear fix with methanol stain with giemsa wash with water air dry with different times and different concentrations of giemsa (diluted in water) To the naked eye the colour of the dry, stained blood smear is a very pale purple bu...

The vignetting was only in the photo, not the view through the eyepiece. I have not (yet) set up a proper photographic solution and the photo you see is taken with a phone, hand-held, using my late father's medical students' microscope. I would not have matched the exit pupil of the microscope to th...

This is a very basic question. I am using a compound microscope with a single eyepiece (my father's wartime medical students' microsocpe). I can't understand the setup with a camera and just bellows with no lens. The eye has a lens and this enables it to focus the nearly parallel rays coming from th...

good, thanks for confirming you can see the image.

I wonder if anybody has experience with staining blood smears.

For now maybe you could look at

https://photos.app.goo.gl/kH3YuH3kZbStH8td8

which should show the photo. Does it?

Nigel

thanks, Rik.

The photo is in Google Photos. I right clicked and got the url and it appeared ok in the preview. I will investigate further.

thanks
Nigel

I am trying to stain a blood smear to reveal the different white blood cell types. So far I have not revealed any. The white blood cells are vastly outnumbered by the red cells but even with a wide field of view and manually scanning across the smear I can only see red blood cells. https://lh3.googl...