Hacker News Reader

Comment by sweca | Hacker News Reader

I have anaphylaxis and I highly disagree about the needle being insignificant. It can be and has been a huge cause of inaction due to fear of feeling and misplacing the needle, e.g. puncturing a vein. I think both can be true: the additional shelf life is fantastic, but so is the needle-free usage.

View on HN

I also have anaphylaxis, use epipens and have never worried about hitting a vein. I don't think I've ever felt the needle when I've used my epipens. But I do think the needle worries other people who might have to administer it to me though and maybe makes them a bit more reluctant to do so.

Going to hospital afterwards (to be monitored for late phase reaction and receive high dose antihistamine and hydrocortisone) usually seems to involve putting a cannula in my hand for IV medication which is pretty well guaranteed to be much more unpleasant.

It also looks to be much smaller

It does look a whole lot smaller than an Epi-Pen in its plastic case. But Auvi-Q (existing epipen alternative) is also much smaller. I don't see any pictures of the neffy case; surely you have to carry it in a case just like the others.

Edit: Found a picture of an official case. Carries two doses and looks roughly similar in size to two Auvi-Q doses: https://andersresearch.substack.com/p/aquestive-therapeutics...

I bet a third party could make a smaller case than that, though. I also expect that neffy is much lighter, as Auvi-Q has a battery and a speaker and a needle and a spring and whatnot.

Good point. Neffy is said to use the same hardware narcan uses, and some googling of images for narcan just has it inside a tear open paper/plastic laminated wrapper.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com