an australian december and the ruined-vial photos

The southern summer opened with the annual reminder that a gel pack does not survive a forty degree transit, illustrated by photographs the room has been accumulating since 2024. The Australian and New Zealand members were unusually organised about it this year, having agreed in November to front-load orders. Most of them still had one parcel go wrong.

• A parcel that spent a weekend in a sorting facility arrived at a temperature nobody wanted to guess at, and the powder was kept and the solution was not.
• Front-loading orders in autumn was reported to have worked for most of the members who tried it, with the usual caveat about a small sample.
• Pharmac and PBS decisions were compared, and the New Zealand members explained a funding process the Australians found bewildering.
• Somebody proposed a shared cold storage arrangement and the mods pointed out that the room brokers nothing and holds nothing for anybody.
• cold_chain_cmdr added the summer figures to the transit table with a note that averaging them into the annual number is meaningless.