Vaccinating Children Beyond the ‘Cold Chain’: Extending the heat stability of vaccines

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Abstract

“In many places, you can often arrive at a health centre – a place that should be buzzing with children – to find it is totally empty, no staff or anything. You understand why when you see that the fridge to store the vaccines is broken and no child has been vaccinated in months.” – Dina Hovland, MSF Nurse and Midwife

More than 22 million children worldwide did not complete basic childhood vaccinations in 2012 and an estimated 1.5 million children aged under five die every year from vaccine-preventable diseases.

Shipping and storing vaccines in a ‘cold chain’ in the tropical heat of many resource-limited countries – whereby the vaccine is kept at temperatures between 2°C to 8°C from the point of manufacture until reaching the recipient – is a tremendous challenge and a major cause of poor immunisation coverage rates. Ministries of Health and organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which carry out vaccination in developing countries, struggle with the immense task of keeping vaccines within the recommended temperatures in contexts where infrastructure is weak and electricity supply and refrigeration unstable.