Improved medicine dropper from Panama

Panamanian pharmaceutical company World Pharmaceuticals SA has been awarded a US patent for a dropping bottle for pharmaceutical liquids that overcomes some of the limitations of current designs.

The new dropper, which is described in US patent number 6,612,469, overcomes two major drawbacks with the conventional device, which consists of a glass pipette with an elastic bulb used to squeeze out drops of drug.

The first is that it has a device that allows the pipette to dispense a set number of drops; conventional dropping bottles require the patient to count the drops, which can also vary in size and dose. Secondly, only the required dose is drawn into the pipette, avoiding wastage.

The patented device consists of an elastically deformable drop dispenser pipette, which is provided at its top with a dispensing hole and is joined to the neck of the bottle. A cap is provided to close the top of the pipette, while at least one pair of semi-rigid wings, wrap around the pipette and are adapted to compress it, by radial action of two fingers, in order to dispense constant doses of the contained liquid.

The patent notes that an object of the present invention is to achieve a structure that is "simple, relatively easy to provide in practice, safe in use, effective in operation and relatively low in cost."​