For over 200 years, medical research and developments such as vaccines have done a lot of work to promote good health and fight disease. Today, advanced vaccines for many different diseases are hard at work preventing illness, and American research labs today are fully staffed. Lab technicians and other scientists are always looking for new ways to fight disease, but these workers need the right hardware for the job. This includes storage solutions. At a lab or a hospital, a vaccine freezer or vaccine refrigerator can easily hold a number of fragile vaccines, while and undercounter lab refrigerator can be very useful for lab technicians. In a undercounter lab refrigerator, lab workers can place tissue samples or vaccines as needed. Best of all, an undercounter lab refrigerator will not take up any space on the counters or floor, as the name suggests. An undercounter lab refrigerator is a model of scientific freezer that can be conveniently installed into a counter assembly, not unlike a dishwasher in someone’s home. What is there to know about vaccines and their storage today?
Vaccines Then and Now
Vaccines got their start when a certain Edward Jenner developed what he named the “arm-to-arm” inoculation method in 1796. In that year, he extracted samples from a person infected with cowpox, and placed these samples into the arm of another patient. This was a groundbreaking new medical treatment, and it helped prevent infections of smallpox. Vaccines continued to develop, as by the 1940s, they were being produced on a large scale for the first time. As of the 1940s, vaccines were often made for common diseases at the time such as whooping cough, smallpox, diphtheria, and tetanus. By now, vaccines have been developed to prevent other diseases too, and illness such as smallpox and Polio are effectively extinct.
Vaccines today at doing a lot of work. Just for one example, measles has been on a serious decline in the United States. As of the year 2000, 546,800 measles deaths were recorded, but by the year 2014, this total dropped to 114,900, a 79% decrease. In addition, the The World Health Organizations, as well as the Measles and Rubella Initiative, estimated that nearly 17.1 million lives have been saved thanks to the measles vaccine since the year 2000. Today, children routinely receive numerous vaccines to protect both them and others from dangerous contagions, and adults sometimes get updates on their vaccines to stay current. The elderly are also encouraged to renew their vaccines, since they may easily spread disease in crowded nursing homes.
Vaccine Storage
Vaccines are fragile and sensitive to temperature, so the staff at a hospital or lab are encouraged to always have the right storage units for them. This means medical fridges and freezers. Not just any commercial cooling unit will do; they are designed for ordinary food, and these units have unacceptably wide temperature variance as people open and close their doors. Instead, the staff of a hospital or research lab are urged to look up medical grade freezer and fridge units that are specially designed to protect vaccines inside.
Lab technicians may choose the right model of vaccine fridge based on their needs. For example, a larger lab with many vaccines on hand must get a large enough unit to hold them all, and someone should calculate just how much storage space they need. After all, a too-small fridge unit cannot hold them all, and a too-large fridge unit would be a waste of money with all that excess space. The unit must also have a space where it can be placed at the lab or hospital, and smaller units can be placed on counters or shelves for convenience. Larger units must be placed on the floor, and space should be made available for them. If possible, lab technicians can invest in and undercounter lab refrigerator, especially in more crowded labs that don’t have much spare room for a cooling unit.
It should also be noted that some vaccines should be stored in a fridge, and a temperature of 40 degrees Fahrenheit is fine for them, according to the CDC. Frozen vaccines will need lower temperatures that can be found in proper medical freezers instead.
