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posted by mrpg on Tuesday March 13 2018, @02:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the fertil-ground-for-mistakes dept.

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...?

Previously: Freezer Malfunction May Have Damaged Up to 2,000 Frozen Eggs and Embryos


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 13 2018, @03:04PM (4 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday March 13 2018, @03:04PM (#651834) Homepage
    The first thing I would look at is to check what kind of clock the embedded controllors in those freezers have. One incident's a freak, two on the same day is starting to get fishy. Is there some kind of y2k problem? Had the fridges been in constant use for two and a quarter years? (as in https://www.cnet.com/news/windows-may-crash-after-49-7-days/ , but based on a 60Hz clock)
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @03:47PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 13 2018, @03:47PM (#651852)

    High-availability machines should probably be "rebooted" once a week or even once day, because those damn overflow errors aren't known until they've been running a long time.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Tuesday March 13 2018, @04:05PM

      by Bot (3902) on Tuesday March 13 2018, @04:05PM (#651859) Journal

      I once had a gaming server, never had a prob with it, rock solid. Then one day I check the uptime. Less than one day. I forgot I set a cron job to reboot it daily just in case.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by rleigh on Wednesday March 14 2018, @12:13AM (1 child)

    by rleigh (4887) on Wednesday March 14 2018, @12:13AM (#652067) Homepage

    For liquid nitrogen storage, there are no embedded controllers. They are double-walled steel containers with a few inches of liquid nitrogen at the bottom. They might have a temperature probe hooked up to a remote alarm to trigger an alert if the temperature rises.

    All the ones I used had a regular filling schedule, usually weekly, plus a daily visual check. The weekly fill was simple--add up to a fill line and you're done. The only way the tank can fail is if someone leaves the lid off for a extended period (which would trigger the alarm), or if someone forgot to check and top up the tank.

    • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 14 2018, @02:32AM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday March 14 2018, @02:32AM (#652124) Homepage
      Thanks for that info. Does sound like human oversight is more likely to blame, and that, even when thrown randomly, occasionally two darts will land in the same bed.
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