
The fate of the medical device industry’s most widely used sterilization process lies in the hands of the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA gave the medtech industry mixed signals in November about the gas used to sterilize billions of devices annually.
The agency said it might seek to cut industrial emissions of ethylene oxide (EtO) by 93% nationwide. While that proposal doesn’t affect medtech directly, it may not bode well for an industry that relies on the gas that the EPA considers a carcinogen to sterilize about half of the devices it produces annually.
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