Cute little glass medicine bottles.

March 11, 2007 10:36 AM

Pharmacy Geeks: Why are some medicines still packed in glass ampules?

A nurse at the hospital I work at gave me an ampule opener so I wouldn't have to risk cutting myself with glass shards as I tried to open tiny glass vials when I become a nurse in a few months.

What is the purpose of packaging medication in glass ampules anyway? Is it something about the type of solution? Preserving it in some way? Is it preparation for use for a particular group of practitioners or something? Why can't the same solution be in another type of container that didn't involve breaking glass to get to it?

posted by dog food sugar to health & fitness (12 comments total)

Pitocin is. Couldn't find a picture though. And can't answer the 'why' questions.
posted by serazin at 11:04 AM on March 11, 2007

(pitocin = synthetic oxytocin)
posted by serazin at 11:04 AM on March 11, 2007

Perhaps some drugs (or salts from the buffer they are stored in) bind to plastic in the more common containers? That's certainly the case for certain reagents we use in the molecular biology laboratory.
posted by dendrite at 11:10 AM on March 11, 2007

also possible that this is a permeability issue. Some plastics are oxegyn permeable. Glass isn't. Glass ampules are tamper proof too.
posted by cosmicbandito at 11:17 AM on March 11, 2007

Medicines that lose their effectiveness (or worse, become harmful) when exposed to air would have to be packaged in a way that made it impossible to use an already-opened dose. And what dendrite said.
posted by Methylviolet at 11:22 AM on March 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

Everyone's heard of "take vodka out, put water back in". You could do the same to a normal vial of something like demerol if you were unscrupulous -- but you can't with demerol, because they issue it in glass ampules.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:23 AM on March 11, 2007 [1 favorite]

Also, many medications have been tested for their storage life in ampoules. Changing the container would mean those tests would have to be repeated.
posted by ikkyu2 at 12:33 PM on March 11, 2007

My girlfriend recently bought some of these cosmetic products. Although the linked image seems to show a little plastic tube, she received a box of glass ampules that she breaks every night.

It seems to me that this is a great way to slice your face up with tiny bits of glass.
posted by b1tr0t at 1:08 PM on March 11, 2007

Glass is also safe to run through an incinerator without producing toxic fumes.
posted by frieze at 1:48 PM on March 11, 2007

What dendrite said is what they taught us in pharmacy school. Lots of drugs stick to the plastic and you can lose as much as 5% of the drug that way, depending on the drug and size of the container.
posted by selfmedicating at 1:59 PM on March 11, 2007

I think sometimes it is just cheaper that way. I can think of many drugs that I have seen packaged in both glass ampules and glass vials with stoppers; identical in both strength and volume but from different manufacturers. Fentanyl (which has extremely high abuse potential so the glass amp would make sense if tamper resistance was the only explanation but then why is it also available in other forms?) is one example I know of.
posted by TedW at 3:09 PM on March 11, 2007

Oh I do love the hive mind. Thank you all.
posted by dog food sugar at 1:49 AM on March 12, 2007