The ups and downs of drug-delivering drones

From the Ganges River to Ghana, drones are delivering vaccines, HIV tests and blood transfusions around the world and cutting waiting times for life-saving healthcare. But is all that glitters really gold when it comes to the next big thing in health?

A year ago, this scene might have drawn confused glances, or even worry, from patients here. Now, these emergency deliveries of blood and vaccines by drone are a twice-a-day occurrence, and no one bats an eye. In Malawi, Zipline signed up to take part in one of three drone testing corridors piloted by the United Nations Children’s Fund . The dedicated airspaces there as well as in India and Kazakhstan are aimed at seeing how well the flying machines can deliver everything from vaccines to emergency medical care, the UN agency says.it will launch a third such corridor in Sierra Leone and that Namibia is also considering joining the pack.

Nyanor works at Omenako, Zipline’s tightly-guarded distribution facility 70 kilometres outside of Accra.The second an order comes in, the facility flies into motion. Inside Zipline’s small pharmacy, employees process the order and pack the cargo — usually a single bag of blood or a few vaccines or anti-venoms, lined by ice packs — into a small padded box. Then another team quickly assembles a drone from an assembly line of bodies and wings hanging on the walls.

But without clear figures from the company, those statements are impossible to verify. And opposition lawmakers, the Ghana Medical Association, and local think tanks have also raised concerns that the deliveries areZipline itself, meanwhile, is now valued at R18-billion, and will expand its for-profitand Unicef partnered to see how well four-propellered drones might work to deliver the infant blood samples needed to diagnose babies with HIV.

Researchers also asked what would happen if pickups were limited to a 25-kilometre radius and finally what it would mean for cost and efficiency if the drones and bikes collected samples for the two tests from one clinic at a time before returning back to the lab in a “hub and spoke model”.when drones were used than for the motorcycle-based system.

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