Over-the-counter asthma medication Primatene Mist will be pulled off the market after Dec. 31, forcing users of the epinephrine drug to stock up while they can or switch to a costlier prescription alternative.

Approximately 3 million people in the United States rely on Primatene Mist, according to the latest statistics from Amphastar Pharmaceuticals, the company that produces the drug. An FDA spokesperson estimates the number to be closer to 1 or 2 million people.

In 2006, Primatene Mist came under scrutiny due to environmental concerns because the inhaler type uses chlorofluorocarbins. The compounds, commonly referred to as CFCs, have been blamed for damage to the ozone layer.

Two years afterward, the FDA finalized plans to phase Primatene Mist out of the market, as part of an agreement signed by the U.S. and other nations to stop using substances that deplete the ozone layer.

Following the FDA’s decision, Amphastar has included information on Primatene Mist’s availability on the company website and the product’s packaging.

While Amphastar spokesman Dan Dischner said that the company is in talks with the FDA about bringing a new, environmentally-friendly version of the OTC drug to the market, this definitely won’t happen before the current drug is made unavailable.

The main concern in pulling Primatene Mist and other CFC-driven inhalers off the shelves is the difference in cost between these products and their prescription alternatives.

Primatene Mist sells for about 20 dollars and is easily available in drug stores and online. In comparison, prescription inhalers, which treat the same symptoms but use environmentally-safe hydrofluoralkene, require a doctor’s visit and can cost anywhere from 10 to 40 dollars more than the epinephrine version of the drug.

Consumers should also be aware of some usage differences between HFA and CFC inhalers. HFA inhalers, for example, need to be “primed” – in other words, users need to spray a pump or two in the air before administering a pump to themselves. HFA inhalers also need to be cleaned more often.

Some patients who have made the switch also report that they feel as if they’re not getting enough medication because the spray from HFA inhalers is less forceful.

The FDA says two other CFC-propelled products, one that uses a combination of ipratropium and albuterol and another that uses pirbuterol, may stay on the market until Dec. 31, 2013.

Infants who live in moldy homes are three times more likely to develop asthma by age 7, according to a new study.

Cincinnati researchers analyzed seven years worth of data on 176 children to study the effects of exposure to environmental particles during childhood and found that asthma rates were much higher among children who were regularly exposed to mold and children whose parents had asthma.

“Early life exposure to mold seems to play a critical role in childhood asthma development,” says Tina Reponen, PhD, lead study author and University of Cincinnati professor of environmental health. “Genetic factors are also important to consider in asthma risk, since infants whose parents have an allergy or asthma are at the greatest risk of developing asthma.”

Mold exposure levels were measured using a tool called the environmental moldiness index, which analyzes 36 different types of mold and can describe the “mold burden” in homes.

Eighteen percent of the children in the study were found to be asthmatic by age 7.
According to current estimates, about 9 percent of children in the United States will develop asthma. Previous studies have shown that rates tend to be much higher among children from poor, urban families.

Asthma cannot be accurately diagnosed until age 7, but symptoms include coughing, wheezing trouble breathing or fast breathing and frequent chest colds. The symptoms can linger for days or weeks and can even require emergency treatment.

The study was published in the journal Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology, the scientific journal of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI).

While a smoke-free home for children who have asthma is the best option, a new study shows that indoor air cleaners can significantly reduce household air pollution and reduce rates of daytime asthma symptoms.

Johns Hopkins researchers found that air cleaners could improve overall air quality in homes, and in some cases lead to a reduction in asthma symptoms that was comparable to the effect of anti-inflammatory asthma drugs. However, the researchers warned, the air cleaners did not reduce air nicotine levels and did not counter all adverse effects of secondhand smoke.

“Air cleaners appear to be an excellent partial solution to improving air quality in homes of children living with a smoker but should not be viewed as a substitute for a smoke-free environment,” says lead investigator Arlene Butz, Sc.D., an asthma specialist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

Researchers followed 115 children, who lived with at least one caregiver who smoked, over a period of 6 months. A third of the households were given two air cleaners, while another third received air cleaners plus counseling on the dangers of second hand smoke. The remaining third was only given air cleaners at the end of the study.

The researchers then measured air nicotine and air pollution levels at the start of and the end of the study, and also compared asthma symptoms and nicotine levels in children living in homes with and without air cleaners.

They found the overall air quality in homes with air cleaners showed a nearly 50-percent drop in pollution, though the air still never reached the quality of smoke-free homes. Meanwhile, levels of air nicotine and nicotine in children remained similar in all households, regardless of whether there was an air cleaner in the home or not.

Additionally, children living in homes with air cleaners experienced significantly more days without coughing, wheezing or difficulty breathing compared with children living in homes without air cleaners. Researchers estimated that children in homes with air cleaners experienced 33 more symptom-free days, on average.

Based on the study results, Butz and her colleagues recommended that parents completely ban indoor smoking and use air cleaners as a temporary tool if necessary on the way to achieving a smoke-free household.

Asthma is the most common pediatric chronic illness. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it affects 6.5 million children in the United States.

More than 30 percent of children in the United States live in a home with a smoker, and up to two-thirds of children in urban neighborhoods live with a least one smoker.

The study was published in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Nobody wakes up one morning and suddenly decides to be a smoker. Smoking is a habit picked up from others who smoke. It’s a social disease. Individuals do it in imitation of somebody they respect who smokes, like parents or teachers, or they do it because their high school or college friends smoke and they want to fit in.

But once you put a cigarette in your mouth, you are exposed (not to mention that you are exposing everyone around you, as well) to the effects of nicotine, which is one of the most highly addictive drugs available today. And the more you smoke, the greater is your urge to smoke, and the more addicted you become.

The smoking habit will wreak havoc throughout the decades of your life because once you start to smoke, its deleterious effects spiral out of control, much like credit card debt. Smoking is associated not only with all kinds of cancer, from oral cancer to cervical cancer, but also with heart disease, which is the leading cause of death in the United States today for both men and women. Since smoking also affects the respiratory system, chronic smokers have a higher incidence of bronchitis (an inflammation of the lining of the tubes that connect the windpipe to the lungs) and emphysema (a chronic lung disease usually caused by exposure to toxic chemicals or tobacco smoke) than those who don’t smoke.

And smoking interferes with the immune system as well; that is, smokers are more prone to getting chronic diseases, flu, and viral illnesses than are nonsmokers.

Then there are the secondary effects that smoking has on others. Pregnant women who smoke have smaller-sized babies and have higher rates of premature babies. And children who are exposed to secondhand smoke have higher levels of asthma.

If you are a smoker, there may be no better thing you can do for your health than to quit smoking, and the best time to quit is as a young adult. You may have started smoking in high school or college, but now you are on your own, away from the peer pressures of your schoolmates and the influence of your parents (who may be smokers themselves), and making a new life for yourself. This is the easiest time to kick the habit.

Of course, quitting is easier said than done. As Mark Twain remarked: “Quitting smoking is easy. I’ve done it a thousand times.”

The reason it’s so difficult to quit is that it’s really a dual challenge, and you are unlikely to succeed in your quest unless you meet both challenges head-on.

The first challenge involves breaking the physical dependency that smoking causes. An absence of nicotine leads to withdrawal symptoms, including anxiety, nervousness, and an overwhelming desire for more nicotine. Very few people can go cold turkey and never pick up another cigarette again. Most people need to be gradually desensitized of their nicotine addiction.

One way to do that is with Nicorette gum or the nicotine patch. These products allow you to alter, over a course of weeks, the amount of nicotine that you ingest, until your body gets used to having no nicotine at all. Acupuncture and hypnosis have also helped people reduce or eliminate the withdrawal symptoms–irritability, depression, and lack of energy–that come from kicking the nicotine habit.

The second challenge for the smoker seeking to quit involves breaking the mental habit that smoking reinforces. The best way to do that is through the same system that got you smoking in the first place, through a peer support system. Just as in overcoming any addiction, breaking the smoking habit requires a support group, which can consist of friends, family, and/or coworkers. But you have to have somebody who is willing to be there for you, to give you the support you need when you are most likely to want to pick up another cigarette.

Quitting should be celebrated at every little step of the way because you’ll be seeing the benefits of your efforts in the minutes, days, weeks months, and years after you quit:

–Twenty minutes after you smoke your last cigarette, your heart rate drops.

–Twelve hours later, the carbon monoxide level in your bloodstream returns to normal.

–Two to three weeks after quitting, your circulation improves, and your lungs begin to function normally.

–One year after you quit, the excess risk of coronary heart disease is half that of a smoker.

–In five years’ time, your risk of stroke is reduced to that of a nonsmoker.

–In ten years’ time, your risk of dying of lung cancer is about half that of a smoker.

–And in 15 years, your risk of coronary heart disease is like that of someone who never smoked.

The long and short of it is, the sooner you quit, the quicker you’ll regain your health.

Forty percent of American children have seasonal allergies. When a parent has allergies, his or her child will probably have them too.

Most allergies tend to appear in childhood. So, if you have seasonal allergies as an adult, you probably started getting them as a kid.

As children, boys get more allergies than girls, but as they get older, women usually catch up to men.

Even though we say allergies are seasonal, they can occur year-round. In the spring, you can get allergies to grass and pollen, and in the fall you can get allergies to ragweed, molds and spores of different kinds.

Allergies occur when pollen, mold or dust kick your immune system into high gear, triggering a release of histamines, those chemicals that are mostly responsible for the sneezing, the runny nose, the itchy throat, and the watery eyes.

If teenagers weren’t properly exposed to their environment as children, their immune system won’t be able to recognize as harmless the pollen, dust and mold spores around them every day.

Loading the Virus Protection Program

Your immune system is essentially a system of specialized cells and organs that protects you from outside threats such as viruses, bacteria and other biological outsiders.

It is during the first decade of life that it learns which biological intrusions it needs to protect you against. What this means is, if you don’t get exposed to many of the harmless biological threats in your environment during your first decade of life, if you do not challenge the immune system early, you may pay the price with seasonal allergies and asthma throughout the rest of your life.

I’m talking about the dangers of over protecting our children. Some of this overprotection has been institutionalized in the form of widespread use of antibiotics, vaccinations against various diseases, cleaner food and water, and better living conditions.

But some parents may make this “problem” worse by keeping their kids at home in a “sterilized” environment – never taking them to the park, never letting them play in a sandbox, never letting them roll around in the grass, never letting them have a pet at home, and keeping them away from other kids who may be sick.

By underexposing our children to bacteria, certain viruses, and other minor threats in the environment, their immune systems will not develop the appropriate responses, and they may end up with seasonal allergies and other problems of an inexperienced immune system.

Studies show that if you have a pet when you’re a kid, you are less likely to get asthma. The same applies to running and rolling around in the grass at the park when you are three years old; those who do tend to have fewer seasonal allergies later on. A little exposure is a good thing.

Allergy Prevention

Prevention is the best treatment for seasonal allergies. Have you heard of spring cleaning? They don’t call it that for nothing.

If people in your household have allergies, it is important to do a thorough cleaning of the house, especially in the spring, by removing all the dust that has collected in your house over the winter.

It’s a good time to shampoo your rugs, vacuum all the nooks and crannies, and remove the mold from all kitchen, bathroom and garage surfaces.

If you have allergies in the spring and summer, take a few precautionary steps to avoid bringing allergens back into the house.

When you come in from the outdoors, don’t bring the clothes you’ve worn outdoors into the bedroom; change in another part of the house and take a shower, if you can.

Avoid being outdoors from the late morning to early afternoon, as those are the peak hours for pollen production. Keep your windows closed if you’re really allergic.

Theories already exist that birth order affects personality – but could it also affect health?

Results from a new study indicate that firstborn children may be more likely to suffer from certain types of allergies, Business Week reported.

Japanese researchers surveyed parents of more than 13,000 children aged 7 to 15 and found that overall, firstborn children were more likely to have hay fever, pink eye due to allergy, and food allergies.

The prevalence of food allergies in firstborn children was 4 percent, 3.5 percent in second-born children, and 2.6 percent in later-born children.

“It has been established that individuals with increased birth order have a smaller risk of allergy. However, the significance of the effect may differ by allergic diseases,” said first author of the study, Dr. Takashi Kusunoki, of the pediatrics department at Shiga Medical Center for Children and Kyoto University, both in Japan.

However, in the same study, the researchers found that a child’s birth order did not seem to affect the prevalence of asthma or eczema.

Further research is needed to learn more about how birth order affects allergy risk, researchers said.

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