Greiner Bio-One North America, Inc. recently announced that they made a monetary donation and also donated some of their products to aid in the fight against Ebola. They believe that it's their duty as a medical product manufacturer to do what they can to help out.

"For us to be able to have the opportunity to donate some products to a cause that is becoming an epidemic is huge for us," Mackenzie Farone-Waite, marketing manager at Greiner Bio-One, told DOTmed News. "We're always looking for opportunities to be able to do something like that."

They made a monetary donation to AmeriCares — a non-profit disaster relief and humanitarian aid organization — and they were assured that it would go directly to assist the Ebola outbreak. They also donated their VACUETTE® Venous Blood Collection Tubes and their VACUETTE® TUBE-TOUCH passive safety device products.

The TUBE-TOUCH product is a needle, safety feature and hub all in one product. The needle goes into the patient's vein and the doctor puts the first blood collection tube into the back of the holder and it automatically releases a safety shield that covers the needle. If the patient moves their arm and the needle comes out of the vein, there's virtually no chance that the doctor will get stuck.

Greiner Bio-One also challenged their partners, competitors and peers to also make a donation to the cause. Their biggest competitor is Becton, Dickinson and Company and a few of their partners include Cardinal Health, Fisher Scientific and VWR International.

“It was really more of a challenge to our competitors and our peers and our friends in the industry to say, 'Hey, listen we dug into our pockets and we donated money and product that is being asked for over there — will you help us and do the same?'," said Farone-Waite.

She hasn't noticed any of their competitors or peers donate yet but a lot of their customers including hospitals, labs, ICUs and blood banks have shown an interest in donating. "We're seeing a lot of impact with our customers, which is really great," she said. "It's a neat thing to see something that you do actually gets other people involved."

Greiner Bio-One is a privately-held plastic manufacturing company with four divisions that manufacture products for blood and specimen collection, tests for the detection of bacteria and viruses, etc. They provide manufacturing, distribution logistics and product application support to hospitals, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

DOTmed News learned about this news from an email that one of DOTmed User's, Block Scientific, Inc. sent to us.

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