Bry-Air Speaks on Environment affects packaging of drugs

Dinesh Gupta, President, Bry-Air | Plastics News | February 2009

Every medicine is hygroscopic and therefore it will have different moisture content at different levels of relative humidity when they are stored or packed. Based on desired moisture content in a particular medicine, Relative Humidity (RH) conditions need to be maintained to ensure claimed shelf life and desired effect of given level of dosage.

It is therefore important that medicines are manufactured in controlled environment of humidity & temperature. This is achieved by taking due care in fabrication of rooms where manufacturing/packaging has to be done including proper vapour barrier provided to avoid ingress of moisture into the room and subsequently spoiling the medicine.

There are two ways you can lower humidity in a room, either through cooling the air to saturation point and condensing the moisture in the air or more easy way of absorbing the moisture by passing air over the desiccant media which has affinity for moisture in vapour form. These are also known as desiccant based dehumidifiers.

Once medicine is packed in proper temperature and RH conditions, it become suitable to be stored in various climatic conditions. However, precautions have to be taken to store them in conditions conductive to packing material used to avoid light, moisture and temperature affecting adversely the medicine packed.

Industry has been handling this problem effectively since invention of desiccant based dehumidifiers about fifty years ago. In India, Bry Air has been serving the industry for more than 30 years to maintain desired conditions irrespective of outside humidity conditions.

Bry-Air is global solution provider for complete environmental control with specialization in humidity control, dehumidification, drying, storage, preservation, air and gas purification and plastics auxiliaries supported by state-of-the-art facilities, worldwide operations and customers in almost every industry.