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Respiration Machine Recall Over Potential Most cancers Threat Leaves Thousands and thousands Scrambling for Substitutes

Breathing Machine Recall Over Possible Cancer Risk Leaves Millions Scrambling for Substitutes

Jayme Rubenstein, a spokesperson for ResMed, said the company is prioritizing the manufacture of devices for patients with immediate ventilation needs, including Covid patients, followed by machines for those with central and obstructive sleep apnea.

In a survey of home medical device providers conducted in April 2020, more than half reported interruptions in the supply chain for CPAP devices and 62 percent reported delays of up to 60 days. The Philips recall “certainly exacerbated the situation,” said Thomas Ryan, chairman of the American Association for Homecare, which commissioned the study and represents the suppliers. (Philips is on his board.)

“Given the shortage of materials to make these devices, such as resins and computer chip modules, and transportation bottlenecks, I expect supply will continue to lag behind demand through 2022,” he said. “It will be a crisis”

Amy Sloane, who learned she had sleep apnea in 2017, began using a DreamStation BiPAP Auto SV device the following year. Overall, she said, her sleep improved. However, after reading about the recall, she became concerned to learn that the sonic cleaning device she was using could break the foam barrier.

“Even more annoying,” she said, “when I manually wiped my DreamStation water tank, there were black particles on the wipe.”

Ms. Sloane, 57, a Baltimore-based attorney, early registered her device with Philips for recall. But she said the company’s only response was to tell her to consult her doctor, who advised her to stop using it immediately. Within a few days, her doctor was able to prescribe a self-adjusting CPAP device from another manufacturer.

As of June, around 40 lawsuits have been filed against Philips on behalf of patients in more than 20 states. Steven Bloch, an attorney for Silver Golub & Teitell in Stamford, Connecticut, said his law firm has filed four lawsuits in Massachusetts, where Philips’ US headquarters are located.

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A Covid Take a look at as Simple as Respiration

A Covid Test as Easy as Breathing

People with diabetes, for instance, may have breath that smells fruity or sweet. The odor is caused by ketones, chemicals produced when the body begins to burn fat instead of glucose for energy, a metabolic state known as ketosis.

“The idea that exhaled breath could hold diagnostic potential has been around for some time,” Dr. Davis said. “There are reports in ancient Greek and also ancient Chinese medical training texts that reference a physician’s use of smell as a way to help guide their clinical practice.”

Modern technologies can detect more subtle chemical changes, and machine learning algorithms can identify patterns in breath samples from people with certain diseases. In recent years, scientists have used these methods to identify unique “breathprints” for lung cancer, liver disease, tuberculosis, asthma, inflammatory bowel disease and other conditions. (Dr. Davis and her colleagues have even used V.O.C. profiles to distinguish among cells that had been infected with different strains of flu.)

Before Covid hit, Breathomix had been developing an electronic nose to detect several other respiratory diseases. “We train our system, ‘OK, this is how asthma smells, this how lung cancer smells,” said Rianne de Vries, the company’s chief technology and scientific officer. “So it’s building a big database and finding patterns in big data.”

Last year, the company — and many other researchers in the field — pivoted and began trying to identify a breathprint for Covid-19. During the virus’s initial surge in the spring of 2020, for instance, researchers in Britain and Germany collected breath samples from 98 people who showed up at hospitals with respiratory symptoms. (Participants were asked to exhale into a disposable tube; the researchers then used a syringe to extract a sample of their breath.)

Thirty-one of the patients turned out to have Covid, while the remainder had a variety of diagnoses, including asthma, bacterial pneumonia or heart failure, the researchers reported. The breath samples from people with Covid-19 had higher levels of aldehydes, compounds produced when cells or tissues are damaged by inflammation, and ketones, which fits with research suggesting that the virus may damage the pancreas and cause ketosis.

The Covid patients also had lower levels of methanol, which could be a sign that the virus had inflamed the gastrointestinal system or killed the methanol-producing bacteria that live there. Those breath changes combined “give us a Covid-19 signal,” said Dr. Thomas, a co-author of the study.