Ha, yes, I do suppose medical-grade peptides need a bit more rigorous temperature control than that frozen yogurt I buried in the snow during a brief power outage…
Re:Open Insulin Foundation
by steveklabnik on Friday July 16, 2021 @10:46AM
(#27856774)
Yep. And this whole thing is a microcosm of the entire situation: the details really, really, really matter. It's quite easy from the outside to not realize how much they really, really matter.
(It is also true that it is not the case that if it is not continuously absolutely refrigerated, it immediately goes bad, which is one reason why the milk analogy gets strained. Milk expires far, far faster, and in a more binary way than insulin goes bad... but freezing it is extremely bad, so... analogies are hard.)
I live in the North and I've been thinking about building an ice box in the basement that stores cold from outside during the winter – mostly for energy-saving purposes, but it would be interesting to try making a system with precise temperature controls.
You can buy 'cold chain' stickers that indicate whether they have exceeded certain temperatures. Could be useful for prepper diabetics. (And for practicing and testing different ways to maintain cold chain in emergency-like conditions)
Yeah, in theory you can stash stuff outside, but that also isn't as simple as it sounds. While I take some issue with the milk analogy below, in this case, I think it fits. Imagine you have a gallon of milk. You lose power. You go stash it in the snow. Okay, it's kept "cold" for some value of cold. That "some value" matters, because with this gallon of milk, you can't smell it to see if it's spoiled, and if something goes horribly wrong, you die. It's not a binary thing as it sounds immediately. "Cold in the snow" is not the same as "kept at the same value I can control exactly in my fridge."