How Green Are Your Lungs?

Husband has asthma, and has been using a rescue inhaler for years. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen one of these jobbies, but they are constructed by inserting a little metal albuterol (or other drug) canister into a plastic sleeve. This plastic sleeve acts as a mouthpiece and a pump so that he can spray the medication into his lungs during an asthma attack, and, one would hope, breathe.

With his last refill came notice that rescue inhalers are going green. Here’s the text of the message:

HFA – an environmentally friendly alternative to CFCs

CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) are chemicals that are often used as propellants in spray cans. Most rescue inhalers, including this one, use CFCs to deliver medication to your lungs. CFCs hurt the environment and damage the ozone layer that protects the earth from the sun’s rays.

The US has agreed to stop using CFCs by Dec 31, 2008. They have already been removed from products like hair spray and deodorant. Hydrofluoroalkane, or HFA, is an environmentally friendly alternative to CFCs for delivering the medication to rescue inhalers. HFA inhalers are CFC-free. HFA is safer for the environment.

HFA inhalers are currently available. The HFA rescue inhalers contain the same active ingredient that is found in CFC rescue inhalers and they are just as effective as CFC inhalers.

Well, yippee. Practically every other product on the shelf has been CFC-free for years, some for decades. Finally, someone in the bloated, wasteful pharmaceutical industry is going green.

But despite what this might do to reduce the average asthmatic’s carbon footprint, I have other concerns.

First, kudos on the industry that the propellant used in inhalers is now going to be environmentally correct. But there’s a bigger problem afoot. Every time you order a refill, you get both the plastic mouthpiece/pump and the metal canister, even though the mouthpiece is technically reusable (currently it is against FDA regulations to simply supply the canister alone). So when the container is empty, you have to dispose of both the spent metal cartridge and the plastic sleeve. A call to my pharmacist confirmed my suspicions that neither part is recyclable. So they’ll end up in some landfill, with the dregs of the albuterol leaching into the water table and the plastic lasting until the ozone layer – along with the rest of our atmosphere - completely disappears and the sun melts us into oblivion. Good job, guys.

Second, if the propellant is so bad for the environment that it can burn through ozone like nobody’s business, then why the heck have we been letting people spray this into their lungs? I don’t know if you’ve seen the statistics lately, but for the last two years, the numbers of children (especially African-American children) being diagnosed with asthma has increased. Yet for decades, the pharmaceutical industry has allowed these products to go unchanged. Yes, I imagine they were required to have some degree of testing done so that whatever propellant they substituted would not be dangerous. But in the time the FDA spent developing and approving drugs like Viagra, for God’s sake, they could have come up with a substance that would propel asthma drugs into children’s lungs safely and effectively. And there are many other populations that use inhalers, for asthma as well as other breathing difficulties.

Believe me, I’m all for doing what we can to keep our ozone layer intact. It gives me a nice and secure feeling having it up there, knowing that a step out of my house to get the mail isn’t going to give me skin cancer. But come on. Let’s use our heads about this. Or we could end up making our environment worse.