Medical insecurity in South Sudan is killing thousands.

Aarav Chauhan

Medical status in South Sudan. Credit: unicef

A health security promise ends when the Cold Chain does.

Imagine walking hours in the grueling 40 degree Sudanese heat to the nearest clinic just to be turned away; because the vaccines have spoiled. This isn’t hypothetical. For approximately 10 million people, this is a typical Tuesday, or a Wednesday. It is every day of the week that these people spend their lives living at the mercy of their healthcare system; which frankly, can not provide.

Credit: The Intercept

Medicines that have been provided simply denaturate in the heat and don’t help them at all. It’s crucial to cool down these medicines efficiently and affordably to ensure the country can move towards better health security. South Sudan ranks among the most medically insecure nations in the world. Decades of conflict and civil war have fractured its infrastructure, and the country’s extreme climate, temperatures regularly exceeding 45°C in the dry season, places extraordinary pressure on the cold chain systems that vaccines, insulin, and life-saving biologics depend on. Yet, the medical storage they stock in rural clinics are usually kerosene powered, chronically underfunded and poorly maintained. This results in a catastrophe: medicines are almost never usable.

• 50% of vaccines in low-income nations are estimated to be wasted due to cold chain failures.
• 45°C+ peak temperatures in South Sudan’s dry season, well beyond safe medicine storage thresholds.
• Around 80% of South Sudanese lack reliable access to essential health services.

These consequences are not just statistics, they are the cries of children dying from vaccine curable diseases like measles and meningitis; diabetic patients not receiving their insulin they crucially need and pregnant women denied oxytocin which degrades in their coolers. Picture an innocent child’s future, destroyed, just because they do not have access to medicine that is effectively available in countries like ours.

These are not deaths from incurable illnesses, but rather logistical failures, something we can and must help fix. Technologies already exist to preserve medicines without spending too much time, money or electricity. A difference of one degree Celsius can determine between life or death. We are not asking the world to cure South Sudan’s diseases. We are asking it to help keep the cures cold. Ice is not an efficient method of cooling and modern coolers are too expensive and require an excessive amount of electricity.

The Coldchain is a spine of global health security. Until we treat it as such, every medicine in South Sudan will carry a quiet unresolved gamble; will it still be alive when it arrives? It’s time we stop losing that bet.