Hi!
We have had our Sakura coverslipper for about 8 years and have never had a
problem. We have only used Sakura coverslipper tape during this time. Our
cytology lab has been using it almost as long. They notice a little
distortion at the edges of the slide. This does not seem to cause anyone any
problems for histology slides. Occasionally the cytologists will need to
recoverslip with a glass coverslip.  Also, the Thin Prep machine is
apparently only FDA approved for glass coverslips from what I understand. We
love our coverslipper because it drastically reduces techs exposure to
xylene and it is so fast.  Good Luck.

Mickie

-----Original Message-----
From: Lee & Peggy Wenk [mailto:lpwenk@mail.netquest.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2000 4:18 AM
To: histonet@pathology.swmed.edu
Subject: TAPE COVERSLIPPERS


Have some questions from our pathologists -

How long have the tape coverslippers been in use in
histology labs? How "old" is the oldest tape coverslipper?

Any one out there been using one for that long?

For those who have been using a tape coverslipper
for that long, have you gone back and looked at
the quality of the coverslip on these old slides? 
Are they falling off? Curling up around the edges? 
Turning yellow? Turning opaque? Getting bleaching
or leeching of tissue stains? etc. I'm looking 
for consistent trends, not the every-now-and-then 
problem.

We have had our tape coverslipper for about 5
years, and have not had any of the above problems,
other than one occasional slide out of thousands.

But our pathologists would like to hear from 
labs with more years of use, to see if they have
had any of these problems.

Please note: I'm NOT saying these coverslippers
are bad. We love ours (we have 2). Just looking
to see if any changes can be expected down the
road. 

We did this when we were coverslipping by hand.
We used to use a synthetic mounting media that 
flowed great while coverslipping (good point), 
took a long time to set (bad point), stains looked
great when first viewed (good point), but if you
pulled the same slides some years later, the 
H&E stains were bleached out (very bad point).
So we switched to the more modern synthetic 
mounting media with anti-oxidant and plasticisor,
and we didn't see that problem again. And, of
course, had to remove the coverslip and restain
any old slides that the pathologists needed to
do a review on. (No, we didn't restain all
"trillion" slides.)

So we just want to see what problems, if any, might 
be arising in the future with the tape coverslipper.

Thanks in advance for any information.

Peggy A. Wenk, HTL(ASCP)
William Beaumont Hospital
Royal Oak, MI 48073