What is a Rubber Stopper?

What is a Rubber Stopper?

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A rubber stopper is a small, tapered plug used to seal the openings of test tubes, flasks and other laboratory glassware. Stoppers made of cork are also available for this purpose. However, rubber stoppers are preferable for applications that require a tighter seal or a greater degree of chemical resistance.

What is a Vial Stopper?

Rubber stoppers allow easy access to drugs contained in glass medication vials, as they can be readily punctured through with a needle or a cannula.

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What is Coring?

After a needle is inserted through the stopper of a medication vial, a small piece of the stopper is sometimes sheared off (known as coring) and may not be noticed.

This small foreign body can then be aspirated into a syringe and injected into a patient. For many years, the contamination of parenteral fluids and medications by particulate matter has been recognized as a potential health hazard

How to Reduce the Chance of Coring

There are strategies that both we and the manufacturers can employ to help reduce or eliminate the risk of coring. If the needle must pierce a stopper, there is a needle insertion technique that reduces the risk of coring during needle insertion through the stopper of a medication vial. The needle should be inserted at a 45-60° angle to the plane of the stopper with the opening of the needle tip facing up (i.e., away from the stopper). A small amount of pressure is applied and the angle is gradually increased as the needle enters the vial. The needle should be at a 90° angle just as the needle bevel passes through the stopper. Second, if the stoppers were made of a material that always floated and were of a noticeable color, they would be easier to spot and would be less likely to be injected in a vertically-oriented syringe. 

We hope this communication will bring to the attention of the readership a probably infrequent but potentially serious problem that is not well known in the anesthesia community. We hope this letter prompts us to consider an engineering solution, of which several suggestions were presented above. In the meantime, we should utilize the technique described above when piercing a stopper with a needle, which adds no financial cost and takes at most an additional 1 or 2 seconds.

Choose the rubber stopper of the correct size for your container. A rubber stopper is designed such that the top end is wider than the bottom end. A rubber stopper will be the correct size for a flask or test tube if the bottom end is narrower than the opening of the flask or test tube, but the top end is wider.

Choose the correct number of holes in the stopper. Most rubber stoppers are solid pieces of rubber with no holes in them. These are fine for working with non-volatile chemicals that do not build up pressure in a sealed container. Certain chemical mixtures have high volatility and can create gas pressure that can break a glass flask or test tube. For such mixtures, stoppers with holes should be used to allow the gas to escape before too much pressure builds. Chemists also use stoppers with holes if they are using the flask or test tube as part of a larger apparatus, such as a distillation apparatus, and will be connecting various sealed containers together with tubing that runs from stopper to stopper. Note that when inserting tubing into the hole of a rubber stopper, a lubricant should always be used to reduce the risk of breaking the tubing or container when forcing it into the hole.

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