In the past few centuries, a number of medical advances and discoveries have transformed medicine and allowed many more lives to be saved. Germ theory, for example, led to the standard practice of sterilization, pioneered by the French chemist Louis Pasteur in the mid-1800s. Meanwhile, vaccines have done a lot of work to help protect children and adults around the world from deadly contagions that once claimed many lives. Vaccines today can shield babies, children, and adults like from viruses like measles, smallpox, and Polio, and many statistics show just how effective vaccines are. The WHO and the Measles and Rubella Initiative, for example, estimated that ever since the year 2000, some 17 million lives have been saved due to vaccines. And from 2000 to 2014, the annual average number of measles-related deaths dropped from 546,800 to 114,900, a 79% decrease.
No doubt vaccines are effective and important to administer, but these vaccines are also delicate, so the staff at a hospital or research lab will invest in medical refrigerators and medical grade freezers to contain them (not to mention bacteria cultures and tissue samples). Vaccine refrigerators and vaccine freezers in particular may be geared for storing vaccines at a safe temperature, though some medical refrigerators and pharmaceutical freezers may be multi-purpose at a lab. What should the staff of a hospital or lab take into account when browsing medical refrigerators for sale?
On Vaccines
Vaccines date back to 1796, when a certain Mr. Edward Jenner developed the “arm to arm” inoculation method to protect patients from the smallpox virus. He did this by extracting a tissue sample from a cowpox patient’s skin blisters, then transferred that material to a second patient. In this manner, Mr. Jenner trained the second patient’s immune system to recognize and fend off smallpox, and this proved to be a success. Vaccines continued to be refined over the following decades, and by the 1940s, vaccines were being mass produced for the first time. Vaccines at the time often protected patients from smallpox, Diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough, typical diseases of the day. Now, by the 21st century, even more viruses such as measles and Polio are also fended off with various vaccines.
Children and adults alike should receive routine shots and inoculations against disease. Responsible parents can bring their children to the doctor’s office for regular shot to bolster those children’s developing immune systems, protecting them from diseases that once often claimed young lives. Adults may get regular shots every few years to keep their immune systems current, and senior citizens may get shots to help reinforce their age-worn immune systems. This can help prevent the spread of disease in a nursing home or retirement community. But before these viruses can be administered, they must be stored properly, and that is the job of medical refrigerators and freezers.
Wholesale Medical Refrigerators For the Job
No ordinary freezer or fridge unit will do, since most commercially available cooler units are only designed for food and drinks in mind, not delicate medical items. Those coolers have unacceptably wide temperature variance when their door are opened, but specialized medical refrigerators and freezers will do a better job of maintaining their internal temperature. According to the CDC, vaccines that need a fridge unit should be kept at a temperature of 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and freezers should store vaccines at temperatures ranging from -58 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit.
Local medical suppliers will have an online catalog that lab or hospital staff members may browse, and some medical refrigerators can be found on the secondary market, too. If such a freezer or fridge is in gently used condition and is looked over before purchase, it can be a fine item to buy. But in any case, these coolers should be the right size and scale for the buyer’s needs. A large hospital giving out many vaccines to patients may need a large fridge to store many vaccines at once, and enough floor space will be needed to store that cooler. A small research lab won’t need such a large unit, and may not have room anyway. Instead, lab staff can buy a petite fridge that can sit on a counter, or even invest in an under-the-counter model to save additional space.
