Environment Slowly Getting Better Due To Propellant Change
At last, after many years, manufacurers in the U.S. have replaced the old CFC-propelled inhalers, used by many people, with HFA propelled inhalers.
The change in law legally occurred on the last day of December last year. Fundamentally, the intent for the change in the law was for environmental reasons. The old CFC inhalers used chlorofluorocarbon. Studies have shown that chlorofluorocarbon is one of the major culprits in depleting the ozone in the atmosphere. What happens is that when these inhalers are used, when the person exhales, he exhales the CFC also. When the CFC hits the atmosphere, ultraviolet light breaks them down. This is what causes the ozone to be depleted.
The U.S. is one of the last major countries to implement the change. Countries such as Canada, Europe, and Japan had all previously made the change.
Americans use drugs every year for symptoms as varied as dog allergy, pollen allergies, and sulfa allergy symptoms. Even though stores stopped selling the older inhalers at the end of 2008, many patients undoubtedly are still using some of the older ones that they purchased prior to this year.
According to the FDA, HFA, or hydrofluoroalkane, is much a much friendlier substance to the environment than CFC.
Since the changeover, users of the new HFA are primarily experiencing two differences. The biggest change is that the newer model inhalers tend to get clogged more frequently whereas with the older inhalers, this was not much of a problem. The other change, from a patient standpoint, is that the taste is a bit different.
Even though the amount of the propellant is small in each individual inhaler, since millions of people used the inhalers each year, the change is expected to significantly decrease the amount of harm done to the environment.
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This entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 3:47 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.