First, let’s go back a month, this from the Will Steger Foundation:
On Tuesday [August 2nd 2011], State Senator Torres Ray said, “I’m delighted to participate in the air quality awareness event organized by the Sierra Club in Minneapolis. Air Pollution caused by humans is an increasing danger for people and the environment. I’m very concerned about the threat to public health posed by cities’ air pollution. Many children and seniors in our City are being diagnosed with asthma disorders and need to take strong measures to address it.”
…
Residents are also calling upon the Obama administration to protect children’s health by issuing strong protections from air pollution like smog. The EPA was scheduled to release its final rule on smog on July 29 but announced last week that it would delay finalizing the rule. The new ozone standard would protect some of America’s most vulnerable populations, including children and the elderly, from respiratory illnesses like asthma. “EPA’s Science Advisory Board and health professionals have advocated a stricter standard for most of the 40 years that we’ve been monitoring ozone in the air we breathe,” said Dr. Simcik, a faculty member at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. “We need an educated public to support these experts and politicians in protecting both our health and our economy.” Dr. Simcik and other concerned citizens of Minneapolis urged the Obama administration to stand up for public health and to issue long overdue clean air protections that protect public health.
###
So the Sierra Club wants to reduce Ozone. But now in the story below the FDA wants to protect it by banning OTC inhalers. Wait…What?
(Yes I know, tropospheric -vs- stratospheric ozone, different animals. But the inhaler imagery with kids has become an icon for eco-crusades, so that’s why I’m pointing it out)
From MSNBC, madness lunacy %$!!@*&^^!! over ozone and an inconsequential amount of CFC’s:
Asthma patients who rely on over-the-counter inhalers will need to switch to prescription-only alternatives as part of the federal government’s latest attempt to protect the Earth’s atmosphere.
The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday patients who use the epinephrine inhalers to treat mild asthma will need to switch by Dec. 31 to other types that do not contain chlorofluorocarbons, an aerosol substance once found in a variety of spray products.
The action is part of an agreement signed by the U.S. and other nations to stop using substances that deplete the ozone layer, a region in the atmosphere that helps block harmful ultraviolet rays from the Sun.
But the switch to a greener inhaler will cost consumers more. Epinephrine inhalers are available via online retailers for around $20, whereas the alternatives, which contain the drug albuterol, range from $30 to $60.
But I wonder, will the American Lung Association get all flustered and launch an ad campaign like they did last November over California’s Proposition 23?
I doubt it, because as we all know, kids with inhalers are needed to combat big oil and CO2.
The eco-world has gone beserkers with this one, even CBS News is asking: Why? Me too especially since global ozone is predicted to recover:
The graph above is from a 2004 EPA report which says:
Assuming only halocarbons from human activities are affecting ozone and global compliance with the Montreal Protocol, the ozone layer is expected to recover by the middle of the 21st century.
And this is well before the FDA decided they had to ban inhalers. Something smells about this.
What will really happen is that this will turn regular people and children into scofflaws, and they’ll buy over the counter inhalers in other countries like Mexico and have them shipped here. It will be another giant sucking sound.
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Brad Kurtz says:
September 23, 2011 at 7:28 pm
Obama appointed this Watermelon to her job knowing exactly what she is. Obama asked for the ruling on CO2. Obama and the EPA are out of control. The EPA is a danger to America and should be abolished immediately.
It’s such a little thing.
The inhaler?
No … the bureaucratic mind that comes up with such utter stupidity.
As a scientist, I have long thought that there was an inverse relationship between asthma and air pollution but never had the data to demonstrate the relationship. Thanks to the people that posted here, I now have the information. I grew up in LA in the 1950-70 time frame and never knew anyone with asthma. How much of the diagnosis of asthma is due to attribution and how much is due to cleaner air. Man never was made to be perfectly clean. Dirt builds immune systems. So maybe, with nothing better to do, the immune system starts attacking the body instead of non-existent invasive germs.
Well I’m one of the people affected by this. I have asthma, as do my father and grandmother. Not only can I not afford doctors and prescription inhalers, I’ve tried them all before (my father can afford them) and none of them work as well or quickly as Primatene Mist, the only OTC inhaler. Not even remotely as well. I am desperately begging and borrowing money to hoard these, but even if I had thousands, they’ll expire in a year or two anyway. What then?
The alternatives not only don’t work as well (for some of us, like all medications reactions vary), but some are actually harmful. Take the ‘asthma medication’ Advair for example, from which users “have an increased risk of death from asthma problems.”
see http://www.advair.com/ (first bullet point).
To me this ban is a death sentence. I can’t afford the alternatives, and even if I could my quality of life will still go way down. I don’t have the faintest idea what I’m supposed to do. It’s hard to believe this is happening, and in America of all places. I can only hope some sort of inhaler black market will open up.
If anyone wants to add some support to a [no doubt futile] attempt to bring some more attention to the issue, you could sign this petition on the new whitehouse.gov petition site:
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions/%21/petition/legalize-cfc-asthma-copd-and-cystic-fibrosis-inhalers/W05N2D6s?utm_source=wh.gov&utm_medium=shorturl&utm_campaign=shorturl
Here’s another website with doctor/patient quotes and some ozone/CFC/HFA science links if anyone’s interested:
https://www.savecfcinhalers.org/JUNK_SCIENCE_KILLS.html
• Fiscal Responsibility
• Constitutionally Limited Government
• Free Markets
We have barely 13 months left to organize, muster a voting majority, and this progressive disaster out of every office we can achieve. We can’t effect real change in the progressive bureaucracies and agencies unless their political supporters are ousted.
Well, I don’t know enough about the atmospheric science to say if OTC inhalers matter a rats-arse or not, but I do know this: if you double or triple the price of inhalers people, mainly in lower socio-economic groups, will die. And quite a few.
Presently about 250,000 die from asthma each year, globally.
One key risk area is the `acute asthma attack’, at home, with no-one around to help. A sufferer has trouble speaking. If no inhaler is available, the chances of an acute attack rise. If no inhaler is available and an acute attack sets in, the chances of dying before reaching hospital are significantly increased. I know this as my wife is a chronic asthmatic and has experienced several near death acute episodes. It is a frightenning thing to see, let alone experience. Asthmatics can become absolutely terrified about their next acute attack, as they know how hight the stakes are.
Diffiucult to put numbers on any of these things, but let’s assume a 300% price rise results in a 10% increase in worldwide deaths from a decrease in compliance with prudent asthma management which, on any view of it, includes having an inhaler available at all times. That equates to 25,000 deaths per year sacrificed on the basis of some (probably, it seems) loopy theory about OTC inhalers contributing to the end of civilisation as we know it …
These people are misanthropes.
If it bleeds, it leads. If it’s not bleeding, kick it until it bleeds. And so our sensationalizing press doesn’t worry about such little trivial things like facts. And when it comes to sensationalizing, FoxNews is no better (or worse) than the rest of the MSM.
So wait, is the ban actually against over-the-counter epinephrine as Dr. Chorley @ur momisugly 8:08 above intimates, or is it against the trivial amount of flourocarbons in the dispenser. I know the reason that was used, but wonder about back channel dismay about epinephrine, AKA adrenaline.
Note, Doc, how many lives have been saved by the easy availability of a life saving drug.
====================
They tried to do this in 2007 and we helped to beat it back. Spread this far and wide and hopefully we can kill it again.
Philip Bradley says: September 23, 2011 at 7:46 pm
…The incidence of asthma is strongly correlated with air cleanliness. The cleaner the air the higher the incidence of asthma.
I believe cigarettes are beneficial to asthmatics too!!!
– ridiculous.
The EPA was all set for their great CO2 as a pollutant power grab, but that is now on hold. What to do? Invent another threat in yet another grab for power and to justify their budget. That is all this is.
Expect them to find more “dire threats” and invent reasons to regulate or ban smaller and smaller amounts of these “threats”. They need to “save the planet”, and if we don’t let them save us from CO2, they will just find some other excuse to “save” (control) us (and save their budget).
BTW, about that ozone hole…
I was listening to a talk show a number of years ago when I heard a caller call in and talk about when they first discovered the ozone hole. It was, I believe, written about in NASA magazine. If i remember right, it was in a 1938 edition…
“Ozone destroying” chemicals were not invented untill the late 50’s or used till the early 60’s.
kim says:
“So wait, is the ban actually against over-the-counter epinephrine as Dr. Chorley @ur momisugly 8:08 above intimates, or is it against the trivial amount of flourocarbons in the dispenser.”
It’s against the CFCs themselves:
http://www.primatene.com/doc/PressRelease07-27-2011.pdf
I’ll have to agree with Gordon Cargal and Anton, the compliant inhalers are very weak. You press it, and hardly anything comes out – it’s hard to get relief from it if you’re already wheezing and can’t draw in a big breath. This Montreal Protocal crap has been out of hand for a while, but as a treaty, there is nothing we can do unless every signatory agrees.
Oh, I forgot to mention that it’s not available in the generic form anymore, so I get to pay big $$$ for something that works like crap.
To me it appears that environmentalists fall into one of two groups:
(1) Those who want to use excessive regulations to bring about Marxism. The pattern seems to be to take money from wealth nations and give it to poor nations.
(2) Those who act like humans are a virus on the Earth.
This appears to be the virus group and they appear to be a cold lot.
Why would anyone want to have others suffer?
Gordon Cargal says:
September 23, 2011 at 7:55 pm
“I am an asthmatic”
One of my kids has asthma.
“When they changed the legal inhalers it was immediately obvious that the medicine delivery was poor and the effectiveness of the meds was undercut significantly.”
Yup. Price skyrocketed and it didn’t work nearly as well. Especially albuterol which is a rescue inhaler and you need that to be as effective as possible as quickly as possible.
“Any lawyers out there want to study this and start suing? I would join a class action in a New York Minute.”
Count me in too. That would probably be the biggest class in history of class actions. EPA probably can’t be sued. Rick Perry would be happy to fire the whole lot of rent seeking bureaucrats in that agency and a number of others. He’ll do it too if we give him the chance.
“This is the dumbest thing ever done by the EPA and I suspect it was fully supported by the drug manufacturers because all the generic patents went away in a puff and they immediately made money hand over fist.”
That agency has done a lot of dumb things. You’d need a graduate degree in EPA Extremities to sort out the dumbest. You’d need to at least minor in US Fish & Wildlife Service Senselessness to figure out which agency is altogether stupider.
“This was the issue that started my long and now fervent fight against insane environmental activism. I will fight the lunatics with literally my dying breath thanks to malevolent government agencies like the EPA.”
Vote for Rick Perry. He’ll clean house in the US Fish & Wildlife Service too. They hurt a lot of farmers in Texas, condemning vast tracts of land to protect useless things like cave crickets, blind salamandars, and bird species that are really sub-species at best that take an expert to tell apart from more common members of the species, and so forth. I have at least two endangered species on my property – black capped vireos and yellow throated warblers and (I sh-t you not) these are different from any other warblers or vireos by a small splotch of differently colored feathers and preference for a narrowly defined habitat. There are many different standards by which “species” are defined. The gold standard is called the biological definition which means that for two populations to be different species they are not capable of cross-breeding under any circumstance. Since it’s nigh onto impossible to test for physical interbreeding capability a very popular looser standard is used called reproductive isolation which pretty much translates to “if no one has observed the populations interbreeding, by voluntary mate selection preferences or involuntary geographic separation, then they are separate species”. This is a lot easier way for biologists to classify different species as it takes virtually no effort and rent seeking federal bureaucrats use these loose definitions to control more private property and enlarge their empires.
James Sexton says: September 23, 2011 at 7:27 pm
Ozone? We only think its worth considering because when we finally had a way to measure it, we discovered a hole we didn’t think was suppose to be there. We don’t know that it wasn’t suppose to be like that all along! And, there’s mounting evidence the hole serves a useful purpose
I have a hypothesis that the “Ozone Hole” results from a Stratospheric Polar Vortex. Polar Vortices “are caused when an area of low pressure sits at the rotation pole of a planet. This causes air to spiral down from higher in the atmosphere, like water going down a drain.”
http://www.universetoday.com/973/what-venus-and-saturn-have-in-common/.
Air towards the top of the stratosphere has a lower concentration of ozone;
http://www.epa.gov/ozone/science/images/FIG-FAQ01.JPG
thus when it sinks within the funnel of the Polar Vortex it displaces the air below it, decreasing the concentration of ozone and creating an “ozone hole”.
For reference, “A polar vortex is a persistent, large-scale cyclone located near one or both of a planet’s geographical poles.” “The vortex is most powerful in the hemisphere’s winter, when the temperature gradient is steepest, and diminishes or can disappear in the summer. The Antarctic polar vortex is more pronounced and persistent than the Arctic one; this is because the distribution of land masses at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere gives rise to Rossby waves which contribute to the breakdown of the vortex, whereas in the southern hemisphere the vortex remains less disturbed. The breakdown of the polar vortex is an extreme event known as a Sudden stratospheric warming, here the vortex completely breaks down and an associated warming of 30-50 degrees Celsius over a few days can occur. The Arctic vortex is elongated in shape, with two centres, one roughly over Baffin Island in Canada and the other over northeast Siberia. In rare events, the vortex can push further south as a result of axis interruption, see January 1985 Arctic outbreak.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_vortex
Here’s an animation of the Arctic Polar Vortex in Winter 2008 – 09;
and this site offers a gallery of Stratospheric Polar Vortices;
http://www.jhu.edu/~dwaugh1/gallery_stratosphere.html
Thoughts and challenges would be most appreciated.
Bwahahahaa. It’s only fair, screw ’em. If they don’t like that, they should consider that when they vote.
D. King says:
September 23, 2011 at 7:48 pm
Brad Kurtz says:
September 23, 2011 at 7:28 pm
This is insane, but blame big pharma and not Obama.
The Montreal Protocol was signed under Clinton (Carol Browner)
You know, this Carol Browner.
“Socialist International, an umbrella group”
I would put money on it that the fake charities and NGOs in this “umbrella group” were lobbying their old mate Carol on the BIg Pharma dollar.
jphilips says: (September 23, 2011 at 10:30 pm) “I believe cigarettes are beneficial to asthmatics too!!! – ridiculous.”
Please keep an open mind, jphilips — I know one asthmatic (and sportsman) who cigarettes give a life to.
Dave Springer says:
September 23, 2011 at 11:56 pm
Gordon Cargal says:
September 23, 2011 at 7:55 pm .
Re: Class Action Suit
Count me in, as well. I’m a rare user of an albuterol inhaler, but when I need it, I really need it. I’m susceptible to lung infections, as a result of radiation treatments from a prior cage match with throat cancer. When these lung infections hit me 2-3 times a year, the inhaler is my refuge until I can get a strong dose of antibiotics to take effect and restore a reasonable lung exchange volume. The last few years, the inhalers don’t seem to be as effective. Now I know why… Believe me when I say, I’d take water boarding any day over that desperate feeling of not being able to get enough air into my lungs.
Aspirated water is an uncomfortable but temporary effect that you can cough out, if you don’t panic. I grew up swimming open water in Wisconsin lakes. As a small child, my parents taught us that we would aspirate water on occasion… and how to deal with it. Don’t panic. Roll onto your side (side stroke) or back (back stroke) as soon as you can and cough the water out. Catch your breath and go back to swimming.
But swelling bronchial passages combined with congested alveoli leave you so short on breath you are desperate. Coughing can make it worse, leaving you with little recourse but artificial means to effect relief. Anything that impairs the effectiveness of an inhaler is willful and needless torture. That should be the basis for any class action law suit.
I’m just back from Spain where I bought 12 salbutamol (= albuterol) inhalers for about $5 each. You can buy them OTC in a pharmacy there although a pharmacist told me they would become prescription only next year. No doubt the price will go up in Spain when they do. The price you pay in the US looks ridiculous to me but that’s big pharma for you. Americans are ripped off by the medical cartel at every turn. You don’t get better outcomes than other countries where health care is typically half the price.
The brand I use (Ventolin) has HFA 134a as propellant. It’s nothing like as good as the old CFCs and the dosage is very inconsistent. It works fine when full and one puff works but the last quarter is pretty useless and I have to use 3 puffs or more. Half as effective so sell twice as many – big pharma again.
Follow the money. Voters don’t pay the politicians’ campaign costs so lobbyists can buy the ‘policies’ they want. The best democracy that money can buy. Here is the UK there are tight restrictions on the total amount of money that politicians can spend of their campaigns – only a few thousand dollars. Crucially the parties are given free television advertising. In the 2005 general election the campaign expenditure of the Conservative Party was £17.85 million (approximately US$25 million), £17.94 million (approximately US$25 million) for the Labour Party, and £4.32 million (approximately US$6 million) for the Liberal Democrats. Enforcement is effective because the parties check up on each other. Set a thief to catch a thief. This all makes politicians more dependent on the party support and so are less easily corrupted.
The clean air fanatics always give me a good laugh – they really have no idea what real pollution is! I started work in Birmingham (UK) in the late 50s when you could smell and taste the foul yellow, sulphurous air and even (some said) cut it with a knife. Flares like little watering cans had to be placed along main routes so that bus drivers could find their way and, on several occasions, I had to have a friend walk in front of my car with a white handkerchief to guide me. Apart from public holidays, it was impossible to see more than a few hundred yards over the rooftops through the industrial and domestic air pollution.
I’m all in favour of clean air. In most cities in the UK, air quality is now pretty good and still improving. Do we really want to bring the economy to a full stop in pursuance of the final 1%?
Philip Bradley says: September 23, 2011 at 7:46 pm
…The incidence of asthma is strongly correlated with air cleanliness. The cleaner the air the higher the incidence of asthma.
I believe cigarettes are beneficial to asthmatics too!!!
– ridiculous.
Then how do you explain the fact that incidence of asthma increased rapidly in the developed world from the 1960s to the 1990s when it levelled out. This being the period of time when clean air acts were progressively implemented.
The incidence of asthma showed no such rise in developing countries where air pollution generally increased during this period.
I direct you to this Australian government site that lists possible causes of asthma.
It does not mention air pollution as a cause, excepting indoor cigarette smoke.
http://www.healthinsite.gov.au/topics/Causes_of_Asthma