Saving lives with cell-aimed drones
TOBY SHAPSHAK: Using drones to deliver blood in Rwanda
Zipline’s blood deliveries demonstrate how innovation needs policy and political will to be successful
In a small hospital in Rwanda, a 24-year-old mother gave birth but immediately began to bleed with what doctors call postpartum haemorrhage. In thousands of cases like this every year across Africa, this condition often results in the mother’s death when rural clinics or hospitals don’t have enough blood to stabilise a bleeding patient. But in this case, a remarkable operation leapt into action. Because Rwanda has been willing to experiment with a new way of distributing its blood supply, the hospital called the blood distribution centre in the capital Kigali, and within 30 minutes blood was delivered using a Zipline drone. Several flights of blood were dispatched that day, effectively saving the young mother’s life. Zipline is an astounding solution to a serious problem: how to maintain emergency blood supplies in a challenging environment, which requires cold storage to transport blood to hospitals and then uninterrupted electricity to keep it cool. Zipline, the brainchild of Amer...
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