A tale of camels, the sun and vaccine refrigeration

Yes, you read it right! There is in fact a thread of logic – very sound logic, if I may add – that connects camels, the sun (or solar panels to be precise), and vaccine refrigeration. Professor Winston (Wolé) Soboyejo, a professor of engineering at Princeton University, and a native of Nigeria, has devised a simple, yet elegant way to refrigerate vaccines as they are transported on camel back to remote places with no road access. In a must-see video, Professor Soboyejo describes the challenge. In these remote places, the only way for children to be vaccinated is for the vaccines to be brought in from the cities first by land rovers and then by camel trains. The roughly week-long journey in the places he studied (Kenya, Ethiopia) is not only arduous, but also wasteful. In current practice, the vaccines are kept refrigerated by ice packs. Once the vaccine container is opened, all the vaccine that is not used up before the ice melts, is wasted. Professor Soboyejo and collaborators thus came up with a simple (apparently!) plan – if Mohammed cannot go to the mountain, then bring the mountain to Mohammed! In other words, they decided that a self-sustained and economical powerpack will travel with the vaccines – on camelback. Deserts have ample sunlight. So, they decided to use solar panels to charge batteries, which would in turn keep the refrigerators cold at all times. They optimized their design on real camels – of all places – in the Bronx Zoo! In the development process, they had to overcome some unanticipated challenges, e.g., the variation in the hump sizes of camels! With exquisite forethought, the solar cells were designed to be lightweight and built with locally available material. For example, the frames are made of bamboo. The vision is that this technology will not only deliver vaccines safely to children in remote desert lands, but also spawn local industry which will manufacture the solar cells. Bravo!