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EPA Bans CFC-Based Asthma Inhalers
bonch writes "The EPA has banned over-the-counter asthma inhalers as part of an agreement with other nations to avoid using chlorofluorocarbons, a substance once used in aerosol sprays. Alternative albuterol inhalers cost almost three times as much as the $20 epinephrine inhalers sold by online retailers."
The amount of CFCs pumped into the atmosphere by asthma inhalers is negligible at best. Even if every person on the planet used one, which they don't.
HFA is a weaker propellant, and has a pretty nasty taste & odor to boot.
Primatene's problem is complicated, because the ban isn't entirely motivated by love for Mother Earth(tm). The DEA wants Primatene off the market, because it's basically aerosolized ephedrine ready for meth production.
* If Primatene is reformulated with HFA, it has to be re-approved by the FDA
* Re-approval would be expensive, and the resulting drug would have only limited patent protection due to massive amounts of prior art.
* The DEA wants reformulated Primatene to include additional ingredients that (supposedly) won't affect asthmatic users, but will taint the ephedrine so it can't be used for meth production.
* A new version reformulated to DEA standards WOULD be profitably patentable, but the FDA isn't thrilled about adding chemicals of no benefit to users to a product used by extremely vulnerable people whose breathing is pretty fragile to begin with. They know that somewhere out there are at least a few dozen people likely to die if they use the new formula, and have made it clear that they're going to hold approval of the new version to the highest possible standards and nix it at the *slightest* hint of trouble.
* Primatene's maker is happy about patentability, but worried about lawsuits. Catch-22.
It's more complicated than what I wrote above, but that pretty much sums it up. It's the perfect storm of stupid symbolic environmentalism, corporate greed, and the war on drugs. Made worse by the fact that the majority of longterm Primatene users are poor and lack proper health care (people with health insurance use albuterol, unless they have very mild asthma and accidentally go somewhere without their inhaler, at which point they run to Walgreen's and buy Primatene to keep around "just in case"). That's also the main theory of why Advair (combination of a steroid and long-but-slow-acting alpha agonist) has a signficantly higher death rate among poor and minority users with seemingly moderate & controlled asthma -- they get prescriptions for Advair and albuterol, buy the Advair, but skip the albuterol because the new formulation is expensive & they don't need it very often. The problem is, when they DO have an acute attack, all they have on hand is Advair, which isn't suitable as a rescue inhaler, and a small percentage of them end up dying under circumstances where albuterol would have saved them. It's a hard theory to ethically test, but one that explains a bothersome side effect (death) of Advair whose victims are overwhelmingly poor Americans.