Pharmaceutical companies love offering their products in pill form. They’re easy to create, easy to take, and all you need is a little water to wash them down. You don’t have to do anything special to store them, either.
However, not all drugs are very effective in pill form. Sometimes a drug is only effective as an injection or an IV drip, or it needs to work faster, or an injection would be much more effective. Even some pills are gel caps instead of the usual powder, a special design that makes them more effective but also more vulnerable to temperature changes. Regular pills usually have no trouble standing up to the hot and cold temperatures cargo experiences during transportation, but these other medications can become useless or even dangerous if you expose them to extreme temperatures.
For many companies, reefer trucks and trailers are the only good solution. The inside of a trailer carrying delicate medication needs to stay at a steady temperature, cold but not freezing, and a refrigeration unit is the most direct way of reaching that range and eliminating the oven effect that causes the interior heat to spike on warm days.
On the other hand, the solution could be simpler than that. Here at Protek Cargo, we offer industrial-strength thermal insulation, SureTemp Cargo Blankets and Pallet Covers that protect heat-sensitive cargo of all kinds from the heat spikes of summer and the freezing cold of winter.
While some cargo is sensitive enough to deserve climate control, goods like flowers, produce, and many pharmaceuticals can do just fine with a much less expensive blanket. You can also use our blankets in reefer trucks as a kind of insurance, a way to keep the cargo safe even if the refrigeration unit breaks down on a hot summer afternoon.
While the word “medication” calls to mind pills and the little orange bottles they come in, it also includes vaccines, glass bottles full of liquids, IV bags, and gel caps that can “sweat” or otherwise change in all the wrong ways when they become too hot for too long. If your job is to transport these medications to the hospitals and pharmacies that need them, then you have to make sure the cargo stays safe from start to finish. But while the cargo itself may be expensive and life-saving, an inexpensive thermal blanket may be all you need to keep it safe.