Needle-free injectors use a high pressure stream to drive vaccines and other medications through the skin into the animal eliminating the need for needles.

Dr Claude Mason, a practicing veterinarian with Swine Health Professionals, told those attending Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2010 last week in Saskatoon needle-free injection offers several benefits.

Dr Claude Mason-Swine Health Professionals

Needles have always had issues.

Three of the big ones and the biggest one is the consumer concern over finding broken needles in food products such as pork.

The second one is the issue around how do we dispose of these sharp products afterwards.

It's always a challenge for farms to do so and then there's the issue of the needle sticks for workers when they're busy injecting thousand of animals and things like carpal tunnel are multiple use injuries to muscles and tendons in the hands and arms of farm workers which can actually result in them having to stop work.

Needle-free injectors get rid of some of the obvious, the broken needles, the repetitive use because the syringes are high powered and the guns are very easy to use.

They don't take a lot of effort to pull the trigger and inject the product.

They tend to reduce the spread because you're not actually putting a needle into the tissues of one animal and then again into the other one and cause transfer of things like blood and perhaps disease organisms.

Dr Mason acknowledges the high equipment cost has slowed uptake and certain high volume products such as antibiotics still need to be applied with needles.

However he expects needle-free injection to become more common because of the down-side of using needles.