
Can this cooler save kids from dying? - mhb
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/The-big-chill
======
thinkingkong
Sounds like it works based on the same principles as a pot-in-pot cooler.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot-in-
pot_refrigerator](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pot-in-pot_refrigerator)

~~~
stephengillie
Today, I learned that an ice cream maker is a pot-in-pot refrigerator with a
mixer.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_maker](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_maker)

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
One thing I like about what the Gates Foundation is that they can focus on
unglamorous, high impact stuff. Keeping vaccines cold in areas without
reliable power is not something makes headlines (apart from Gate's publicizing
it), but that will actually save a lot more lives than many of the high
profile new treatments that gain the notice of the press.

~~~
dlevine
If you are interested in this kind of stuff, I would recommend reading "Doing
Good Better." [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OYXWL4W/ref=dp-kindle-
redirect?...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OYXWL4W/ref=dp-kindle-
redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)

~~~
barbs
I wonder how that compares with "The Most Good You Can Do".
[https://www.amazon.com/Most-Good-You-Can-
Effective/dp/030018...](https://www.amazon.com/Most-Good-You-Can-
Effective/dp/0300180276)

------
wcdolphin
Does anyone have a link to a diagram describing how this works? I don't
understand how heating it re-condenses the water.

~~~
maxerickson
I imagine it's an absorption chiller. Here's a manually cycled one from the
past:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icyball](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icyball)

The video here shows a lot more about the fridge and a little about the
cooler:

[https://www.theglobalfight.org/innovation-reaching-last-
mile...](https://www.theglobalfight.org/innovation-reaching-last-mile/)

------
stephengillie
This is in the same line as another article from 12 days ago: Drone Delivery
Becomes a Reality in Remote Pacific Islands [0]

> _The conditions in Vanuatu make vaccine distribution a tough challenge.
> Today, shipments are flown from the three major islands (which have cities
> and airports and such) to small rural islands in 9-seater planes. When a
> plane rolls to a stop on the grass airstrip, it’s met by someone from the
> local health clinic—but that’s assuming that one of the few trucks on the
> island is available and in working order.

The health worker picks up the vaccines, which are packed in ice, and hurries
back to the clinic to stash the precious vials in a refrigerator—but that’s
assuming the fridge and the clinic’s solar power system are working. Any
breakdown is a serious problem, because spare parts can take weeks to arrive.
And the whole operation is very expensive._

Vanuatu's residents are looking into skipping the remote refrigerators and
transporting vaccines by drone. An ideal solution seems to be a combination of
both, giving flexibility in both transport and storage. How much do these
weigh - could they be transported by drone easily?

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17202831](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17202831)

~~~
teachrdan
I think the idea is that you wouldn't need this kind of refrigerator with a
drone. Instead the drone would be dispatched the moment the next batch of
children need to be vaccinated.

This is ideal because you don't need a heavy, expensive refrigeration unit to
keep vaccines cool for days of travel, thus decreasing the cost and expense of
vaccination.

Obviously this won't work everywhere; extreme weather, like storms or even
high winds, may make drone delivery impossible for much of the year. But it
appears that the more we can deliver vaccines by drone, the better.

~~~
namibj
There are ways to fly reasonably fast with rather cheap technology, if you
have some way of bringing the fixed-wing aircraft up to at least over about
half the speed of sound. This would e.g. be easy to archive if you use
something like a coaxial folding propeller, though if you try, you could
probably get away with a single folding propeller, or at least without needing
the coaxial nature to provide counter-rotation, as a large enough part of the
wings should be outside of the whirl the prop creates, so it can provide
enough force against the prop to keep the plane spinning relatively slowly.

The technology I'm referring to (a ramjet) is unfortunately not too efficient,
but the low-tech nature of it, at least as far as manufacture is concerned
(design benefits greatly from modern computational fluid dynamics), makes the
manufacturing cost of it, including a fuel tank, come in at about 10-100$.
It's basically a fancy shaped pipe with something like a fuel pipe or so
coiled around it (for cooling and to ensure sufficient temperature of the
fuel), which can just be hydroformed from a seamless section of stainless
steel pipe. They guzzle fuel, but as long as you either have an electronic
valve a microcontroller can adapt to e.g. a simple flow meter or pressure
sensor, along with a temperature probe, they only need the fuel to contain
enough butane/propane or so to self-pressurize, and otherwise require the fuel
to not tar/char/soot up any of the fuel nozzles and such.

Theoretically, though one might prefer to run it on liquid hydrogen in that
case, the same technology, but with different tuning could run a similarly
rather cheap Mach 2~3 (at surface level) reaching thing light enough to be
lifted by a pair of movers or similarly build men. That would be hard to do
without going for the hydrogen, and that is unlikely to be prevalent on a
small pacific island.

Both of these potential things do fall under the category "Your scientists
were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn't stop to think
if they should.", the latter even under the category "ITAR want's to have a
word with what you made there.", due to the necessary automatic navigation and
speed, as well as technological level of materials used, as high-tech
airframes are expensive.

~~~
me_again
That sounds very interesting and cool. But the lower-tech approach in the
original article sounds radically more practical in real terms than either
drones or liquid-hydrogen-powered ramjets ;-)

~~~
namibj
This was the general medicine-remote-island-delivery approach ;).

The LH2 ramjet could probably be made to launch from a <100m long catapult, I
once did a few calculations and UHMWPE fibers should allow accelerating within
iirc. 50m to Mach 0.7 with something like a large (half-ton, due to the energy
density) steel coil spring (like in a watch, just a "little" larger) at the
muzzle and that coiling up the rope pulling an iirc. 100 kg aircraft with a
sled or so, due to the ramjet not delivering enough thrust at lower speeds.
The side effect would be that because they gain thrust with speed (up to a
point, for the LH2 constellation somewhere over Mach 3), there would be plenty
of thrust to spare, and combined with the high structural strength necessary
for the catapult, and the lack of vertebrae on board, turns up to about 30~50
G are feasible, all at near ground level.

While there is certainly an appeal to this, and the technology being
sufficiently low-tech for a home shop (I am just going to refer to Sam
Zeloof's garage wafer fab), any attempts at building something like it as a
large hobby project would be futile for there being no way to test it outside
of a remote desert area or the ocean, both rather inhospitable to a one-man
flight crew. There are reasons supersonic aircraft are not tested over
inhabitation. It would not be nice to a street it could technically fly
through, unless the buildings are already blast proof.

And a hobby project of that scale you can't even play with will not be worth
it.

(If you happen to know how to play with something like this despite the
supersonic-over-land ban, please divulge your secret.)

------
iamthepieman
Now they need to market this to beach goes, survivalists, preppers, beer
obsessors and other people with disposable income so that it can become
commoditized.

~~~
maxerickson
The capacity is ~2 beverages.

I think it doesn't matter a great deal, the value of vaccination is so high
that each cooler can cost quite a bit and have a bunch of entities
(governments, non profits, etc) happy to pay for it.

------
userbinator
Reminds me of the
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icyball](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icyball)

------
beenBoutIT
Hopefully it can save kids from dying, only to make them extremely
disappointed with the lack of detail in the vague explanation of how the
cooler works.

------
konschubert
Can somebody with insight into the area explain how much of the difficulty in
vaccinating children is due to political/cultural reasons and how much is
logistics?

Also, I'm just impressed with Bill Gates. Here is a man who had everything and
and decided to do as much good as possible with it.

~~~
masklinn
It's highly dependent on the environment.

In sub-saharan africa it's mostly logistics, in western countries it's
cultural (anti-vaxxers), in some other countries it's political e.g. fear of
western interventionism and harm under guise of humanitarianism… sadly
justified: the CIA organised fake vaccination campaigns in Pakistan to
pinpoint OBL, and while officially that program was shut down who'd trust
these claims?

~~~
emiliobumachar
Wow, I did learn something today.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-
vacc...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vaccination-
campaign-endangers-us-all/)

"In its zeal to identify bin Laden or his family, the CIA used a sham
hepatitis B vaccination project to collect DNA in the neighborhood where he
was hiding." [...] "The deadly consequences have already begun. Villagers
along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border chased off legitimate vaccine workers,
accusing them of being spies. Taliban commanders banned polio vaccinations in
parts of Pakistan, specifically citing the bin Laden ruse as justification.
Then, last December, nine vaccine workers were murdered in Pakistan,
eventually prompting the United Nations to withdraw its vaccination teams. Two
months later gunmen killed 10 polio workers in Nigeria—a sign that the
violence against vaccinators may be spreading."

~~~
arcbyte
"The CIA" \- is made up of people.

Who are the specific people that came up with this idea, pitched it, agreed to
it, and executed it?

Names are needed.

------
Veelox
tl;dr

Vaccines need to be kept at 2C-8C before they are used to be effective. This
is a problem in Africa because power can be inconsistent and villages are
remote. Two improvements have been developed.

MetaFridge is a new fridge that can keep vaccines cool for up to five days
without power. It can also display how long the vaccines are still god for and
transmit data to a service team if needed.

Indigo is a new type of cooler that can be carried on your back. It works by
heating it up which puts water into a high pressure compartment. This is
sealed by a valve. Once the valve is flipped, the Indigo can keep the vaccines
cool for up to 5 days with no ice or power.

MetaFridge is in the field with a solar power option in the works. Indigo is
in field trials with results suggesting 4x as many places can be reached.

------
motionispower
This looks to me like a band-aid solution for the real problem: lack of
transportation infrastructure. If these people had better transportation
options they wouldn't have to walk hours to get water, go to school, etc. It
would also result in faster transport of vaccines.

You can ship t-shirts and plastic chairs from western countries and make
yousrelf feel good because you're "helping". But what about solving the real
problems like infrastructure? The west invested in infrastructure in china.
Now china is investing in africa.

~~~
linuxkerneldev
> the west invested in infrastructure in china.

Do you have any evidence that this is true? As far as I can tell, China
invested in infrastructure in China. "West" just buys products. Your statement
is equivalent to claiming that Apple invested in infrastructure in China when
the reality is that Foxconn invested in infrastructure in China and Apple just
buys the output.

------
Double_a_92
More like "Can this cooler give kids autism?" /s

------
cpr
Gee, why am I cynical about this?

[https://worldmercuryproject.org/news/bill-gates-are-
vaccines...](https://worldmercuryproject.org/news/bill-gates-are-vaccines-a-
miracle-over-disease-and-a-fantastic-investment/)

~~~
gowld
Because you read a pseudoscience website that doesn't understand the
difference between elements and molecules containing elements?

~~~
Double_a_92
I bet he still using salt in his food.

------
mcs_
Mi piacerebbe sapere come garantire la genuinità del prodotto trasportato. La
falsificazione è una realtà (sono stati spesi grandi capitali per proteggere
industrie non vitali come l'intrattenimento).

~~~
kjeetgill
Run through google translate: I would like to know how to guarantee the
genuineness of the product transported. Counterfeiting is a reality (large
capital has been spent to protect non-viable industries such as
entertainment).

