It was not sterile
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How it happens
A maker with a good formula and a clean workspace fills eye or wound product into commercial bottles, rinses carefully, and believes the result is adequate. Sterility is a validated outcome and carefulness is not a substitute for it.
The dropper makes it worse
A dropper tip approaches the eye and returns to the bottle, so contamination introduced on first use is then cultured in the remaining product. Commercial ophthalmics address that with preservatives, sterile filling or single-use units.
And the consequence is an eye
Which is why this gets its own page rather than a line. An eye infection in an animal from a contaminated product is a serious harm and an entirely avoidable one.
Wound products are the same argument
Anything going onto broken skin or into a wound cavity is in the same position. A cleaning product for intact skin around a wound is a different and much easier proposition.
Our containers are clean, not sterile
And we will say so if asked. There is no rinse, no boil and no alcohol wipe that turns commercial packaging into sterile packaging, and suggesting otherwise would be the worst kind of helpfulness.
The format is the answer, not the container
Sterile-filled units or single-use ampoules, from a filler equipped for it. That is a specialist operation and the honest advice is to go to one rather than to approximate it.
Which is a sale we would rather lose
A customer looking for a dropper bottle to fill eye product into is a customer to turn away. It costs one small order and it is plainly the right call.
There is no partial credit here
Most packaging questions have a better and a worse answer. This one has a capability you either have or do not, and approximating it is worse than not attempting it because the product then looks like the real thing.