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from the left-the-freezer-door-open-again dept.
University Hospitals has notified about 700 fertility patients and their families that the frozen eggs and embryos they had stored at one of its hospitals may have been damaged over the weekend when the temperature rose in a storage tank.
The problem, in one of two large freezers preserving specimens at the UH Fertility Center housed at the Ahuja Medical Center in Beachwood, was discovered on Sunday morning. It occurred some time after staff left the previous afternoon, according to Patti DePompei, president of UH Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital and MacDonald Women's Hospital.
The liquid nitrogen freezer held about 2,000 egg and embryo specimens, according to Dr. James Liu, chairman of the department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at UH Cleveland Medical Center. Some patients had more than one sample stored, and some of the samples were provided as long ago as the 1980's.
Also at Newsweek.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Sunday March 11 2018, @11:22AM
Apologies. I have spent too long working with people from the telecommunications industry, where diversity means 'having more than one path from one end of a circuit to the other end of a circuit'. The Wiktionary etymology [wiktionary.org] for 'diverse' gives a derivation from the Latin past participle of diverto “to turn or go different ways, part, separate, divert”, and I was using 'diversity' in the sense of having more than one way of achieving the required solution - in this case having two independent freezers, with samples split between the two.
The actual solution would require a risk analysis, and choosing which risks you wanted to mitigate. In theory, such an analysis would have been done and recorded. For example, having two freezers in the same room guards against failure of an individual freezer, but not against an event that destroys the hospital - such as a fire, tornado, or earthquake. Most companies that back-up their data will look to have two copies stored in physically separate locations, far enough apart that a single disaster is reasonably unlikely to destroy both backups. If you think of sperm, ova, and embryos as a form of data, similar principles could apply.
Thank-you for querying my use of industry-specific jargon.