Posted on 12/02/2008 6:28:14 AM PST by engrpat
WASHINGTON — Last warning: Asthma inhalers go "green" on Dec. 31, forcing patients still using the old-fashioned kind to make a pricey and even confusing switch.
The medicine inside these rescue inhalers — the albuterol that quickly opens airways during an asthma attack — isn’t changing. But the chemicals used to puff that drug into your lungs are.
No more chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which damage Earth’s protective ozone layer. By year’s end, all albuterol inhalers must be powered by the more eco-friendly chemical HFA, or hydrofluoroalkane.
The down side: The new inhalers cost more, $30 to $60 compared with as little as $5 for the disappearing generic CFC inhalers.
And patients face a learning curve. HFA inhalers must be used differently than the old-fashioned kind. The medicine feels and tastes different, sometimes alarming new users despite doctors’ assurances that it works just as well.
"There’s still significant confusion," says Dr. Harvey Leo of the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. "Patients will tell you, 'I don’t feel the puff anymore.’ "
Calls from parents unsure how to use the new inhalers, or even what they are, have increased in the past two months as more drugstores run out of CFC-powered inhalers and automatically switch people who’d been expecting a mere refill, he adds.
(Excerpt) Read more at star-telegram.com ...
I have the HFA’S and they do not work well. I’ve had trouble inhaling them during an attack even with careful attention to instructions. Used with the spacer, they are useless.
Hey it worked for the ozone hole once, why not try it again?
Didn’t the scientist refute their own results on the CFCs causing the ozone hole? — after they ran some actual lab experiments? When asked why they didn’t do the experiments in the first place, they said something like, we didn’t think it necessary.
Like DDT before, Liberal hoaxes never die, they just keep on screwing up people’s lives.
Mexico still sells the other inhalers cheap. Of course, border town trips are a bit risky these days. Will stock up again on next vacation farther south. Yet it is ridiculous that it has to be done because of enviro whackos.
You can prolly still get the old style ones in Mexico.
BS!.................We banned CFCs nearly twenty years ago and the "Ozone Hole" is still there, bigger perhaps! The CFC-ozone scam was only to make DuPont richer because the patents were running out on Freon.................
Nebulizer machine works well for me these days...and of course, can't haul one of those around in your pocket. :-(
I don’t know if these are the kind, but there are a new kind asthma inhalers that have proved to be deadly. A friend of mine looked into it after his son went into cardiac arrest and died because of one. :( I could look up the info. if anyone is interested.
Isn’t it said that the ozone layer has been known to get bigger and smaller? Not really effected by us.
The total cost of Environmentalism, as a religion, numbers in the millions, if you include malaria deaths due to the banning of DDT, automobile deaths due to the cafe standards which led to unsafe cars and others that I can't think of now, but have been documented elsewhere.
I don’t know about the “layer” but the hole fluctuates.....................
What exactly was your experience?
Why "useless" with the spacer?
AS Steve Martin’s Navin Johnson said, when he realized that his “guess your weight” concession at the carnival was
giving 50 cent prizes for correct answers that cost one dollar to participate: :” It’s a PROFIT deal!!!!!”
Some of those inhalers such as Flovent cost $150
So what makes hydrofluoroalkane so expensive? Does the new propellant reset the drug to non-generic status? Either way, it sounds like BS.
While the hydrofluoroalkane propellant may be “eco-friendly” how long before some study shows it to be harmful to humans. We saw this with the government mandate adding MTBE to gasoline to save the planet only to find it was a serious health and environmental hazard.
"Step right up and win some crap!"
I over used an albuterol inhaler and it put me in the hospital with an irregular heartbeat. Had to have my heart shock back into normal rhythm.
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