In the twilight years of the 18th century, Edward Jenner awakened a storm of biomedical technology and engineering when he exposed 8-year old James Phipps to cowpox blister fluid. The boy recovered, and soon proved to be resistant to the deadly disease known as smallpox, which had been responsible for millions of deaths throughout Europe. By developing the first vaccine, Jenner demonstrated to the world of science that weakened microbes could be used as preparatory stimulants to predispose the body’s immune system to eliminate threats before they metastasized. Vaccinations, while powerful in impact, are fragile units. They are often liable to lose their potency when exposed in environments that are too hot or cold. In what healthcare administrators ruefully call The Great Loss of 1998, over 200,000 doses of anthrax vaccination was compromised when exposed to freezing cold temperatures. Due to the potentially severe ramifications of another incident like this, the authors of this paper feel that further emphasis should be placed towards safe and efficient transportation of sensitive medical materials to locations of constrained resources, such as Sierra Leone.

We propose the development of a novel containment device for vaccinations, with the goal of being as close to a universal accommodation as possible. The container will be a box consisting to numerous material ingredients. Layers of fiberglass and plastic will provide structure to the container, with a center filled with air and foam packing. We selected these materials because of their low cost and popularity with current pharmaceutical transport, but we are open to exploring if a country such as Sierra Leone would be interested in providing their own materials in order to make the containers locally, thus improving the sustainability of the service. While ice packs were considered for the containers, we realized that their effectiveness would be very limited. Sierra Leone boasts a tropical environment, with hot temperatures year round. In addition, many clinics in the region receive their deliveries by motorbike, and that means that while vaccines may be shipped to the country in bulk, they are delivered to the clinics in incremental amounts. Ice in the box would surely melt quickly unless they were supplemented with another cooling agent. On the exterior of the box, solar panels would be fixed along the flat surfaces and will use Sierra Leone’s near-omnipresent solar energy to fuel solar cooling technology. While solar cooling is a novel technology, industrial and mechanical engineers are fascinated with the properties of clean energy and how to harvest it in a small package. This would be the backbone of our container. The box also comes with elastic strapping to fasten it to motorbike transports. The elastane would be strong enough to support the weight of a fully loaded container and have pegs that allow for stacking.

From a logistical and feasibility standpoint, the pretotype is sound. Vaccines are already transported in disposable packaging since they began being mass-produced, and transport practices with the new containers would emulated the current ones. With the reusable nature of the containers, as well as their low cost once solar cooling becomes a public commodity, the footprint they leave on the planet will not be too considerable, nor would the build design be strenuous on the producers, whether they be in-house or international. Ethical issues are hardly a problem; healthcare is a an allopathic industry currently, spearheaded by vaccinations and antibiotics. Only select groups of people will protest more efficient and effective ways of medication transport, and those people have issues with the usage of such materials, not the transport methods themselves. As such, patients are predicted to have no problems with the new containers. Therefore, the market for these products and services that are attached to them will be open for the present and the foreseeable future.

Because the design of the vaccine containers is supposed to be secure for the sensitive contents, we decided to put the vaccines through the normal packaging and transport process, with integration of the package and basic instructions on how to pack the contents. Evaluators would then monitor the results of the shipping product, paying special attention to events such as temperature exposure, and physical damages while en route to the Sierra Leone clinics. Many packages should be put through this process so the sample size is large enough to form a significant correlation.  

Flyer

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This is an idea of what our design would looke like:​

The first sketch is the outside, the second is the inside of the box, and the last one is an idea of what the cooling system tubes could look like from above.