Ampoules are a simple vehicle to deliver medication, but they don’t come without risks. Sharp edges produced by breaking them for use have been known to cut health care providers, and glass particles can contaminate the contents within. Injuries from ampoules are the most common type of sharps injuries in health care, and one in three providers has experienced one in their career.
If that’s news to those in medicine, who often worry more about needlesticks, it may also surprise the public safety providers who use ampoules regularly: law enforcement officers who perform field drug identification tests. It’s not a well-studied phenomenon, but they likely face similar risks and similar injuries from the ampoules used in many test kits.
“At one of our police agencies here, an officer was using a reagent that was in a glass vial in a plastic bag,” said Mike Powers, a Florida-based law enforcement consultant whose career included 25 years with the DEA and 10 with the state’s attorney’s office in Tampa. “It actually sliced the guy’s finger. Had that involved fentanyl, it could have been disastrous.”
“Those kinds of accidents can happen,” said Susan Hallowell, Ph.D., an analytical chemist who’s worked for the Department of Defense, FAA, Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration over a five-decade career. Hallowell recently designed a comparison test of field-ID products that had university students examine samples using different methods. “We had standardized reagents and amounts and various metrics to evaluate color changes,” she recalled. “It was a very controlled experiment.”
Nonetheless, one participant cut themselves with a broken ampoule.
“It was a chemistry student, because we wanted people who were up on organic chemistry,” Hallowell added. “So, it was even someone who was used to manipulating their hands a bit.”
SIMPLE IS GOOD
That mishap occurred in the contained environment of an academic laboratory. Now imagine performing the same test on the side of a highway at 2 a.m. as unwary drivers whiz by.
Even if you avoid cutting yourself, that’s a poor environment for activities that require concentration and fine motor skills. So, while common field drug tests may generally produce accurate results, they also take time, demand focus and pose at least some risk to officers.
There are alternatives without potential jagged edges and sharp bits, but they’re still not exactly easy. They often require scooping, transferring or manipulating samples. They may rely on extra pieces like swabs or pricey single-purpose analyzers. Their processes can be vulnerable to contamination. Virtually none are easy to use in high-pressure field situations.
And then there’s a simple wipe.
That’s the approach taken by Trace Eye-D, a Florida-based provider of technologies to help law enforcement combat illegal drugs, fight terrorism and identify threats. For officers who must presumptively ID illicit substances in the field, it offers a series of simple-to-use towelettes – pretreated to identify fentanyl/opioids, methamphetamine and cocaine, as well as explosives, with an immediate color change – that simplifies the sampling and testing process to one piece and one motion.
Just open, wipe and look at the result (a few products require snapping an internal seal first). The wipes are wet, making them especially effective at collecting trace residue.
“Simple is good,” said Powers, who liked the product so much he agreed to advise the company. “Sometimes these drug cases can have you out at 4 in the morning and even into the next day. If that’s the case, what you don’t need is to unfold something and start reading through how to do it. At 4 in the morning, you’re often not thinking as clearly as you would at noon.”
The Trace Eye-D wipes use colorimetric chemistry to identify substances of interest. They contain reagents that change color in seconds if a test is positive. This can work with organic and inorganic compounds and with trace or bulk amounts of liquids, powders and pills. This provides a presumptive identification that must be confirmed by a lab but can justify detaining a suspect, rather than letting them walk away.
Those reagents are standard across all field drug identification products; the only difference lies in how they’re packaged and used.
“The chemistry is well characterized. The novelty is in the presentation,” said Hallowell. “The beauty of colorimetric wipes is that you have great sample efficiency with the wetted wipe, and it will give you a fast first-level response.”
With comparable performance, then, law enforcement users can consider aspects like safety, simplicity, convenience and cost. In each of these areas, wipes offer some key advantages.
POCKETFUL OF PROTECTION
A fingertip sliced by ampoule glass isn’t the end of the world – unless you get fentanyl in it. Fentanyl, as LEOs well know, can be deadly even in miniscule amounts. And while intact skin is a good defense, nonintact skin is a vulnerability. That can be a reason, given the drug’s current ubiquity, to consider alternative methods. Ditto for intoxication with coke or meth.
There’s additional safety in not needing to manipulate powders or samples, and sampling methods can’t get much easier than wiping. “Everybody can understand ‘just wipe,’” said Powers. “We want to make it easy for law enforcement.”
“Even smart people can use things wrong,” added Hallowell. “And the more complicated the device, the more opportunity you have to do it wrong.”
While its process is simple, Trace Eye-D also offers free online customer training around its fentanyl wipes. Its course overviews the dangers of fentanyl and the science behind the wipes, offers guidance in PPE use and result interpretation, and provides directions for storing and disposing of the wipes after tests.
Trace Eye-D products are also low-profile and easy to carry. Packages are just 77 by 110 by 3 millimeters, and each wipe weighs just 3 grams.
“You can fit them in your cargo pants. I could put them in the smallest pocket or a tiny purse or anything, and it’s a ready-to-use system for immediate detection analysis,” said Hallowell, who also serves as an advisor to Trace Eye-D. “And they have minimal quantities of reagents, which means you have fewer environmental concerns with disposal. It isn’t like you have two milliliters of sulfuric acid to figure out how to get rid of. It’s a very small amount, and it’s not free liquid – it is contained on the pad.”
Flexible packaging keeps the reactants contained and serves as a vessel for the chemical reaction and analysis. The wipes function at temperatures from minus 60 to 135 degrees Fahrenheit and have a validated shelf life of six months. And everything is easy to use, even with gloves.
Finally, the price point for drug wipes is far easier on tight law enforcement budgets than many alternatives.
“Some of these companies have tests that cost thousands of dollars,” noted Powers. “I try to convince people we have a better mousetrap. I think it’s a good product – I wouldn’t be with them if I didn’t.”
While Trace Eye-D didn’t invent the colorimetric detection of drugs, it did develop the first wipes for drugs, as well as a novel less-toxic reagent for fentanyl/opioids. Those grew out of the company’s initial work wipes for explosives detection, its initial product line.
“Now,” said the company’s CEO, Chris Baden, “we have a complete line that is something that absolutely stands apart from everybody else in the in the market.”
For more information, visit Trace Eye-D.
