Tinytags to Monitor Vaccine Storage.

You may remember the news story in South Wales a few years ago, where school children contracted meningitis, despite having been vaccinated against the disease.
It made huge headlines and there was much debate over how it was allowed to happen.
The simple answer was that the vaccines used were ineffective as they had probably been stored at too low a temperature. This highlights the very important issue of temperature controls for medicine storage and the implications of a very simple procedure going wrong.

Every year thousands of pounds worth of vaccines are destroyed in the UK due to the inappropriate storage or handling of medicines or a break in the cold chain.

In the UK teenage girls have recently been given the opportunity to be vaccinated against the Human Papilloma Virus that can cause cervical cancer, an initiative that could save the lives of around 400 women each year. An HPV vaccine costs around £300 per patient. The immunisation of 12-13 year olds will cost around £100m a year and the catch-up campaign will cost up to £200m a year.

Just imagine the waste of resources when vaccines have to be destroyed, the inconvenience to the patients who need to be revaccinated and the loss of public confidence in the health care system, if an ineffective vaccine is provided because it has not been kept at the optimum conditions.

Practitioners in the health sector have been encouraging the use of data loggers to reduce problems when storing vaccines and enabling them to deliver a more effective service.

Tinytag data loggers are automated and highly accurate. They can be programmed to run continuously, reading and analysing temperatures every few minutes. This means that if there is a problem like a power cut over a weekend, professionals can find out the fluctuations in temperature of a storage fridge to analyse if they have been affected.

The Gemini Data Loggers’ Tinytag range of products offers more than one solution to the storage of vaccines. Tinytag data loggers are compact, splash-proof, lightweight and cost effective, ideal for the monitoring of temperatures of sensitive products, such as pharmaceuticals in fridges, freezers and cool (ambient) storage.

For more information on Tinytag data loggers in the healthcare and laboratory industry please log on to www.geminidataloggers.com.

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