Originally Published May/June 2000
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
Soft Landings, Hard News, and the Internet
On the road
As I write this piece, Ben is putting the finishing touches on a trip report detailing his visit to a round of trade shows in the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden. Traditionally, these reports have been drafted for internal distribution. They serve primarily to alert editors of other Canon publications of news items that may be of interest for their particular publication. I also suspect that it's a way for our boss to make sure that we haven't been spending our time sipping champagne at the Café Marly when we should have been working the show at Villepinte.
Typically, the bullet points and terse notes contained in the reports are later massaged into articles that aliment the various sections of EMDM. But many items never make it into print, primarily because of timing considerations and space constraints, and that is a shame because much of what we learn could be of value to our readership. Enter the Internet, where traditional publishing schedules and space restrictions are irrelevant. These trip reports will now be posted on Canon's Medical Device Link Web site in a section titled Reporters Notebook.
This section premiered in March with my notes on a conference on medical device regulation in London organized by the Association of British Health-Care Industries.
By the time you read this, Ben's trip report will have been posted. In it, he briefly describes a turnkey laser marking system that he came across at Technishow in Utrecht, Netherlands. The instrument employs a proprietary technology that enables users to mark almost any polymer without the use of material additives or surface treatments. The process has been used by Siemens to mark a hearing aid component and the technology holds promise for catheter marking, according to a company spokesman. At Scanplast in Göteborg, Sweden, Ben learned of a hybrid contact and noncontact metrology system that can perform cavity measurements down to 25 µm. One company that Ben spoke with plans to use the device to produce microcavities for integration into DNA-analysis systems. The full-text version of these articles will appear in the September issue of EMDM.
Editors from other Canon publications will also be contributing their notes and article drafts to the section prior to publication. If packaging issues are an area of interest, you may want to scan notes posted by Pharmaceutical & Medical Packaging News editors Annie Lubinsky and Erik Swain.
Annie recently reported on a joint press conference by Ashland Specialty Chemical and Cookson Plastic Molding Corp. to announce the development of welded plastic pallets with an extremely sturdy bond. One interesting application profiled in her report describes a two-piece plastic pallet suited for pharmaceutical use. Erik covered the April meeting of the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) meeting in Toronto. US FDA regulations on postapproval changes to pharmaceutical packaging, writes Erik, have prompted ASTM to reorganize its consumer packaging subcommittee in anticipation of drafting new standards. Some of the tests expected to be required, from thermoforming characteristics for blisters to closure seal integrity, do not yet have standards in place.
Our objective in publishing these notes on the Internet is to provide you with immediate news of events and developments that may have an impact on your business. As always, we will strive for accuracy, but we won't place a premium on polished prose or other refinements that would delay publication of these items.
We will post the reports as soon as they are filed by the editors. I can't say with which frequency they will appear, but considering the amount of business travel we do around here, you probably won't see a week go by without a fresh installment in the Reporters Notebook. Consider it yet one more reason to bookmark Medical Device Link, and to return to the site often.
Norbert Sparrow
Editor
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