Insulin Pens and Insulin Cartridges Should not be Shared
Posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
The FDA issued a bulletin stating that insulin pens and cartridges should not be shared, even if the disposable needle is replaced.
The FDA knows of two hospitals that shared insulin pens amongst 2,000 patients, even though they changed the disposable needles, but the agency warns that patients can still transmit blood-borne infections amongst each other.
“Insulin pens are designed to be safe for one patient to use one pen multiple times with a new, fresh needle for each injection,” said Amy Egan, M.D., deputy director of safety at the FDA’s Division of Metabolism and Endocrinology Products in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.
The hospitals contacted the patients and some of them reportedly tested positive for Hepatitis C, although the FDA is unaware if they contracted the virus via insulin-pen-and-cartridge sharing.
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