Anesthetic gases used to knock patients out during surgery is accumulating in the atmosphere and potentially contributing to climate change.
A team of scientists detected these compounds in the atmosphere as far from human civilization as Antarctica, the American Geophysical Union reported. Anesthetic gases such as desflurane, isoflurane and sevoflurane have been found to have an influence on how much solar energy is stored in the atmosphere.
Only 2.2 pounds of desflurane is believed to be equivalent to 5,512 pounds of carbon dioxide in potency. In the study the researcher reported atmospheric concentration of desflurane as 0.30 parts per trillion (ppt), Isoflurane as 0.097 ppt, sevoflurane as 0.13 ppt , and halothane as 0.0092 ppt. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is believed to have reached 400 parts per million in 2014, which means it is a billion times more abundant than the anesthetics. The team did not include the common anesthesia nitrous oxide in the study because it can originate from a wide variety of sources.
The team made its findings by collecting samples of air from sites in the Northern Hemisphere from 2000 onward, as well as taking measurements from the icebreaker research vessel Araon and the South Korea Antarctic station King Sejong. This data was combined with a two-dimensional computer model of atmospheric transport and chemistry. These anesthetics make up only a small chunk of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions, but have been on the rise in recent decades.
"Health care in and of itself in the U.S. is one of the worst polluting industries," said Yale University School of Medicine anesthesiologist Jodi Sherman, a reviewer of the paper. "It generates 8 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases according to one study. Add to this the fact that climate change has been recognized by the World Health Organization as the number one health issue of the 21st century, and it behooves us to do a better job with emissions."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
