Getting Life-saving Medicines . . . from a Drone
Note: This is Part one of a two-part series on an innovative collaboration between Zipline, a California-based robotics company; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and UPS.
The Rwandan government will soon use drones to deliver life-saving blood supplies and rabies vaccine to health workers in the western half of the East African country.
The effort is part of an innovative collaboration between Zipline, a California-based robotics company; Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and UPS. The partnership could help save lives around the world.
In areas where maternal death due to postpartum hemorrhaging is a critical problem, and where there is a risk of contracting rabies, the blood, plasma and rabies vaccine that the Zipline-made drone will deliver in Rwanda later this summer is greatly needed.
But what this unique collaboration means for the future of the transportation of humanitarian relief and vital medical supplies — especially in remote, hard-to-reach locations — is where this first drone drop gets even more interesting.
We sat down with Kevin Etter, an executive at UPS who has been working on-site at Gavi for two years on humanitarian logistics projects, and Moz Siddiqui, the project lead at Gavi, to find out why sharing information and resources can save even more lives.
Source: UPS
