Have you ever heard about using glycol-encased probes for temperature monitoring? Please read this article if you don’t know about it. Temperature probes with a thermal buffer (the most common substance being glycol) has been strongly recommended and promoted, today we are focusing on discussing about the importance of this kind of probe use with an analysis that showed the differences between a glycol-encased probe and standard probe exposed to air.

According to CDC, vaccines’ storage requires temperature maintaining between 2℃ and 8℃  (36℉ and 46℉) in the refrigerator and between -50℃ and -15℃ (-58℉ and 5℉) in the freezer. Vaccines are extremely sensitive to temperature, any environment with improper temperature range would cause vaccines’ effect loss and even increase the risk of infection. Therefore, the temperature must be recorded accurately for the efficacy of vaccines, or damaged vaccines would bring risk to human’s health. By this point, it is necessary and important to have reliable temperature monitoring devices. With the help of qualified temperature loggers, accurate data can determine the effectiveness of vaccines directly and vaccines would be applied more safely.

For those common temperature probes that are not encased in glycol bottles, they are perfect for normal situations’ temperature recording especially measuring ambient environment. However, when the thing comes to measure the temperature of a medical product inside a container, normal probes might not be helpful. As they are capturing air temperature, a slight change in air flow could result in a different temperature reading. So any normal actions like opening the refrigerators’ door, warm air rushing in would influence the reading of the normal probes.

The temperature of vaccines is different from air temperature, they are more stable because they are stored inside refrigerators, keeping air flow outside. The temperature would not change quickly and frequently in response of ambient environment. According to the guidelines of vaccine storage provided by CDC, putting the temperature probe inside a sealed bottle filled with a thermal buffer can reflect vaccine temperature more accurately because of its ability insulating surrounding air flow. Glycol is the preferred material rather than other kinds of thermal buffer for now, the reason is that glycol has a low freezing temperature which means broader scope of application and more accurate measurement ability such as in medical freezers.

As a conclusion, a normal probe has more variables and instability including the air flow and surroundings, data is not convincing and reliable enough so it is not suitable for measuring vaccine temperature. On the other hand, glycol-encased probes are able to reflect actual vaccine temperature in the refrigerator with more accurate readings. Therefore, using glycol-encased temperature probes would be more helpful for vaccine protection and thereby ensuring the efficacy which even helps a lot in protecting human’s health at the same time.