The right tool for an emergency: naloxone, epinephrine, and pharmaceutical delivery devices

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 11: Boundary Work

Abstract

Abstract: We examine the expansion of pharmaceutical tools developed to address two medical emergencies in the US, autoinjectors and intranasal sprays of naloxone to reverse opioid overdoses and autoinjectors and intranasal sprays of epinephrine to treat anaphylaxis from food allergy. Through a qualitative content analysis of FDA and pharmaceutical industry press releases of all currently approved emergency-use, delivery devices for naloxone and epinephrine, we examine how the pharmaceutical industry constructs the “ideal users” of each technology. This focus allows us to examine who is granted agency, whose liberties are being infringed upon, and how the pharmaceutical technologies fit into larger public health frameworks. The social context, including defining who is the most sympathetic user of each medicine, reflect how different ideal users are constructed through technological details like dosing and press releases of these two emergency medications. We find substantial variation in how pharmaceutical companies and the FDA describe key technical variations in these pharmaceutical devices, particularly around discussions of the user and the dosage. These medications, in both their initial iterations and the subsequent expansions, reveal two different “ideal users” of the technologies, and correspond to two visions of pharmaceutical use in a public health context. Preliminary results reveal that the same technologies draw on very different ideas of the ideal user: the good citizen and the responsible caregiver.

Authors

• Laura Halcomb, Virginia Tech

• Stephanie Anne Nairn, University of Central Florida

• Jill A. Fisher, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill