Paper Craft To Save Lives Of Asthma Patients

I grew up with asthma, and had several inhalers growing up, all is well now, but I know how it feels to all of the sudden not be able to breath normally. Well apparently my inhalers were a considerable luxury, especially when I was younger and my inhaler had an attached spacer.

The problem is that aerosol inhalers that help with asthma attacks are cheap enough, and necessary enough to get ordered, but young children are generally unable to coordinate an intake breath with a spray of the inhaler, meaning its effectiveness is lost. So for those children they use a thing called a spacer, which is really just a chamber that catches the aerosol from the inhaler and holds it until the child breathes in.

The downside of those spacers is their 50+ dollar price tag each. So Changemakers has come up with a paper version that can be made for about a quarter a piece and sent, several at a time, for regular postage, whereas the plastic ones are about the size of a can of soup, causing higher shipping costs too.

Really it's a genius way to save a lot of lives, especially since the death rate among asthma victims is about one and a half percent in Mexico.

An extremely affordable device for better asthma care (Better breathing with origami) [via MAKE]