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A second fertility clinic has reported a liquid nitrogen cooling system failure:
A San Francisco fertility clinic says that a problem with the liquid nitrogen in one of its storage tanks may have damaged thousands of frozen eggs and embryos, triggering calls and letters to more than 400 concerned patients of the Pacific Fertility Center.
The nitrogen level in one tank fell very low, according to Dr. Carl Herbert, the fertility clinic's president. Herbert told ABC News that an "emergency filling" immediately took place, and that the tank's contents were then transferred to a fully functioning tank.
The problem struck on March 4 — the same day that a similar cryogenic tank failure was reported in Cleveland, where the University Hospital Fertility Clinic is investigating "an unexpected temperature fluctuation" that jeopardized its tissue storage bank, where liquid nitrogen preserves eggs and embryos. That incident reportedly affected some 700 patients.
One failure: accident. Two failures...?
- How cryostorage is supposed to protect embryos like those possibly damaged at 2 fertility clinics
- Proposed class action lawsuit filed against UH for egg, embryo freezer malfunction
Previously: Freezer Malfunction May Have Damaged Up to 2,000 Frozen Eggs and Embryos
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @02:48PM (1 child)
Look, fertility clinics became a thing at some point in time; they probably both bought freezers at the same time, probably from the same company.
As with all of us, they just set it and then did forget it. Just like hard disk drives fail eventually, so do freezers. Well, they failed.
Next time, have a protocol in place for dealing with such failures. Have another freezer ready to go, and be ready to make transfers.
Back ups, folks. Backups.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday March 13 2018, @04:02PM
Your business revolves around long term storage, and you set and forget freezers? Looks a very Italian way to do business.
The nature of the failure is the problem, anyway. There is no way such freezers are engineered in such a tight way to suffer a mechanical failure the same day. And if they were they should have been transported together and installed together in the same place with the same temperature, vibrations....
A clock related bug, malicious guys, extortion, a couple who asked their old egg back to two separate backup clinics and having those making up the same excuse, the need for sacrifical eggs in some esoteric ceremony, mossad agents removing two samples of Hitler's genome, aliens, anything, anyhing is still more credible than a coincidental failure on independent systems within that bracket.
Account abandoned.