Apropos 'Establishment of innovative specialist cardiac indigenous outreach service in rural and remote Queensland'.

摘要

Point-of-care diagnostics (POC) at the 18 rural and remote sites in Queensland [1] would be beneficial for the Indigenous Australians with rheumatic heart disease, ischaemic heart disease and congenital heart conditions only if POC had been stored at the specified temperatures during transit and in the individual storehouses. The components in the POC have to be protected against rigours of humidity, and atmospheric pressure, which would naturally occur all over the globe. For example, during the heat wave in Chicago in 1995, the temperature was 40 °C but the heat index, an estimate of evaporative and radiative transfer was 48.3 degC [2]. The power shutdown in August 2003 in vast areas of the northern parts of the USA and Canada lasted several days. Refrigerators in only 10% of the paediatric practices in 12 regions of Ontario, Canada had thermometers placed in them to measure the temperature, according to study [3], range outside the recommended level of 2-8 degC in almost one third of cases.