Missiles aren’t the only thing flying through the air in Ukraine. So says the CEO of Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry (WAF), Sachin Shivaram, whose employees in the company’s Consumer Prod-ucts division worked around the clock this summer to build thousands of medical sterilizers to be emergency air-freighted to Ukraine by UNICEF. UNICEF placed an order for over 3,000 of the sterilizer units, which are like pressure cookers and offer an economical solution for large-volume sterilization. 

UNICEF, which has been buying the sterilizers from WAF since at least the 1970s, purchased six 40-ft. containers of 41-quart units and two containers of the 25-quart size, according to Joel Andrew, a WAF business development manager. Normally, WAF ships three or four containers to UNICEF annually.

Even as production was being fulfilled, two ship-ments of the urgently-needed larger sterilizers were air freighted to get 140 packed into medical kits in war-torn Ukraine, Andrew said. 

WAF is ISO 13485 certified for medical devices, and their topload sterilizers are ideal for rough environ-ments because they’re operated manually, require just a small amount of water to create dry steam, and use any type of non-electric heat to reach the high temperature for achieving 15 psi pressure sterilization. They provide dry sterile dressings and instruments, killing bacteria and micro-organisms in a matter of minutes, according to the company’s website. WAF employees were build-ing about 12 per hour to complete the order.   CS