A liquid nitrogen failure in a storage tank at a San Francisco fertility clinic experienced in a storage tank may have damaged hundreds of eggs, according to an article on the Washington Post website.
The incident at Pacific Fertility Clinic followed a similar malfunction the same weekend at an unrelated clinic in Cleveland, the University Hospitals Fertility Center.
“We can’t say definitively nothing like this has ever happened, but we are certainly not aware of anything,” a spokesman for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine said in the article. “Now that we have a second incident, it becomes very important that we learn as much as we can about both, to search for commonalities and see if there are . . . risks that have now come to light that need to be addressed.”
The California clinic also has brought in a multidisciplinary team to investigate the malfunctioning tank and “every aspect that involves cryopreservation.”