1st Drone Delivery Service For Blood

Rwanda has launched a national level delivery program that will allow blood and plasma to be flown to health clinics across the country by drones. It’s considered the world’s first commercial delivery service using drones. The poor road conditions have often delayed delivery of medical supplies to the rural western part of the county by hours and sometimes even days. Recode.net reports that the program has been launched in collaboration with California based drone startup Zipline, shipping company UPS Foundation and Gavi, a vaccine fund backed by Bill Gates. The Rwandan government is paying for the service, which costs about the same as the motorbike blood deliveries the country relies on today. Zipline itself is a private company that includes among its investors Microsoft co-founder Paul Alien and Yahoo founder Jerry Yang.  CNN Money reported that earlier it took an average of four hours to make an emergency delivery to a hospital. With a drone, those can be completed in 15 minutes, according to Jean Philbert Nsengimana, Rwanda’s minister of information and communication technology. In certain cases it was really bad. Roads could become impassable during the rainy season, slowing vital deliveries from the National Centre for Blood Transfusion.