I was wondering if anyone had any life cycle data for the carbon impact of a 1g vial of amoxicillin and a 4.5g vial of tazocin? I can't seem to find it anywhere!
Dear Chris
Not exactly on Amoxi vs Tazo but 3 of comments
1. In the days of the Sustainable Development Unit (fore runner of Greener NHS) work was done looking at the top 20 NHS drugs regarding carbon footprint. I recall that simply due to the mass prescribed Amoxi was top of the list.
2. Some years ago a medical student carbon footprinted the care pathway of patients undergoing DC cardioversion on DOAC vs warfarin. The DOAC was smaller as the patients travelled less and had fewer appoints cancelled because the INR was out of range. We attempted to get pharma to divulge the C/F of their drug procurement. No success here at all.
3. When synthetizing drugs it is not just the direct energy that's important but also the yield at each step of the synthesis. Imagine for example a synthesis with 8 steps each with 50% yield. This means for 1kg of API the manufacturer needs 100kg of raw ingredients. A huge effort is made to increase the yield but also to manage the waste.
KR Tom Pierce
Hi Chris. It might be worth contacting https://www.yewmaker.com/mcf-classifier - they've carbon footprinted loads of medicines (although they are mostly oral meds I think, but they may have started with others).
Or (you may have looked here already) https://healthcarelca.com/ which is a global database of healthcare life cycle assessments.
Dear Chris
Not exactly on Amoxi vs Tazo but 3 of comments
1. In the days of the Sustainable Development Unit (fore runner of Greener NHS) work was done looking at the top 20 NHS drugs regarding carbon footprint. I recall that simply due to the mass prescribed Amoxi was top of the list.
2. Some years ago a medical student carbon footprinted the care pathway of patients undergoing DC cardioversion on DOAC vs warfarin. The DOAC was smaller as the patients travelled less and had fewer appoints cancelled because the INR was out of range. We attempted to get pharma to divulge the C/F of their drug procurement. No success here at all.
3. When synthetizing drugs it is not just the direct energy that's important but also the yield at each step of the synthesis. Imagine for example a synthesis with 8 steps each with 50% yield. This means for 1kg of API the manufacturer needs 100kg of raw ingredients. A huge effort is made to increase the yield but also to manage the waste.
KR Tom Pierce
Hi Chris. It might be worth contacting https://www.yewmaker.com/mcf-classifier - they've carbon footprinted loads of medicines (although they are mostly oral meds I think, but they may have started with others).
Or (you may have looked here already) https://healthcarelca.com/ which is a global database of healthcare life cycle assessments.
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