Ensuring safe storage of vaccines to protect the lives of our Children
 
Vaccinations are important to protect our child from deadly diseases. Ensuring vaccines reach every child, wherever they live, is a complex process. For this, all vaccines must be stored at the appropriate temperature of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius all the time. Keeping vaccines too cold can be just as harmful as keeping them too warm and extreme temperatures can cause loss of potency which can never be restored. Several times, this can also lead to fatal situations and the deaths of children. Hence, vaccine cold chain storage is extremely important to prevent damage to vaccines and make sure that children who receive these vaccines do not have any adverse side effects.
 
The World Health Organization has a Performance, Quality and Safety (PQS) process which prequalifies products and devices so that these products are assured of their suitability for use in immunization programs. PQS standards are the globally accepted standards to ensure the quality of devices thereby ensuring good quality of vaccines. In addition, there is specific cold chain equipment that avoids the risk of freezing and are categorised as Grade A Freeze free equipment. Unfortunately, in our country, the immunisation programs use a very large number of cold chain equipment that are neither PQS qualified nor Grade A Freeze Free protected, thereby endangering the lives of millions of babies and children of our country.
 
What is worse is that recently the WHO has suspended the PQS qualification of several devices as they were not protecting vaccines. In addition, several devices have been removed from the PQS catalog as they are no longer compliant. These devices belong to two manufacturers which also include a Chinese company. Unfortunately, India has been predominantly using cold chain equipment of only these two companies and the decision to buy them is driven purely by buying the cheapest equipment and not the best quality and reliability.   
 
Please sign this petition to create more awareness on this critical issue and urge Dr. Pradeep Haldar, Deputy Commissioner, Immunization, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to immediately replace all the non-PQS devices in India with PQS qualified Grade A freeze free protected devices. We also petition Dr. Haldar that the Ministry should not purchase equipment based purely on the cheapest price but look at the best quality and technology; as well functioning PQS certified equipment is essential to protect the lives of our children.