A rough transition to a new asthma inhaler
Millions of people with asthma and other lung diseases will have to switch inhalers by the end of the year. And for many, the transition will not be smooth. The change is to comply with the 1987 treaty to protect the earth’s ozone layer. It bans most uses of chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which are used as propellants in many inhalers. For one thing, the old inhalers (picture above, top) cost one-third the price of a CFC-free inhaler, which uses propellants called HFAs, for hydrofluoroalkanes. People with asthma use an average of three or four inhalers a year, but some patients use one a month. HFA inhalers must be pumped four times to prime them—a number that was not so critical with the more forgiving CFC inhalers. HFA inhalers also have a weaker spray. They also require a slower inhale. HFA inhalers need to be washed with warm water and air dried once a week. The medication is stickier and will clog the hole, reducing the amount of medication the spray delivers.
Not surprisingly, the taste is in the mouth
There’s a secret ingredient in every food, and it’s called the mouth. What goes on in there—chewing and mixing the food with saliva so that it releases aroma compounds—goes a long way in determining flavour. Being able to recreate mouth conditions in the laboratory is useful for food-product researchers. Now Gaelle Arvisenet and colleagues at Ecole Nationale D’Ingenieurs Des Techniques Des Industries Agricoles Et Alimentaires, a national school for agricultural and food industry engineering in Nantes, France, have come up with an artificial mouth that can take on harder foods. Like other artificial mouths, it mixes in artificial saliva in proportions that match real mouths, and uses inert helium to withdraw volatile compounds for measurement. What sets it apart are the steel chompers, which are nothing like human teeth but do a fine job of masticating food samples (which are rotated to mimic the action of the tongue and jaw). The researchers, who describe the device in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, say that in tests on apples, their mouth produced a particle mix quite similar to that produced in human mouths. With further fine tuning, the device should be useful in measuring how flavours change with chewing.
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