A SENIOR medical officer says engineers need to upgrade their knowledge about maintaining cold chain equipment used to store and transport vaccines.
“Engineers must be skilful in using cold chain equipment, such as deep freezers, solar refrigerators, cold-boxes, vaccine carriers and ice packs, which are essential to maintain vaccine quality,” said Dr San Shway Wynn, the director of Health Department’s Public Health division.

He was speaking at the opening of a six-day train-the-trainer course for cold chain engineers at the Summit Park View Hotel on July 5. The course was jointly arranged by the Ministry of Health and the United Nations Children’s Fund.

The 24 engineers, from the Health Department’s expanded program on immunisation, will pass on their knowledge to cold chain personnel in townships.

Dr San Shway Wynn said the country’s first immunisation program – for tuberculosis, tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough – was launched by the Health Ministry in 1978 and expanded in 1990 to include polio and measles.
He said a tetanus immunisation campaign for women aged between 15 and 45 would he expanded this year by 76 townships to 144. The campaign is aimed at reducing the incidence of tetanus in infants to one in every 1000 live births.

The manager of the expanded program on immunisation, Dr Than Htein Win, told Myanmar Times on the sidelines of the course that the maintenance and repair of cold chain equipment was more important in rural areas because they often lacked electricity supplies.

Vaccines needed to be stored in solar-powered refrigerators in rural areas to maintain their potency, he said.