The toxicology report on Northwestern football player Rashidi Wheeler showed an absence of the asthma medication albuterol in his blood at the time of his death, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Albuterol is the drug Wheeler was taking to help prevent the asthma attacks that had plagued him during his college career and that is being blamed for the 22-year-old safety's death during preseason conditioning drills on Aug. 3.
Bronchial asthma was listed as the cause of death.
There are two likely possibilities why albuterol didn't show up in Wheeler's blood test:
He did not use his albuterol inhaler before the Aug. 3 drills.
Doctors recommend that asthmatic athletes take the medication 15 minutes before a strenuous workout to head off an attack. Traces of albuterol, a drug that relaxes bronchial muscles, would have remained in Wheeler's bloodstream for six hours.
Wheeler's inhaler wasn't working properly. Schering-Plough, which produces the Proventil inhalers many asthmatics use, recalled 59 million of them in March 2000 as "a precaution to address the remote possibility that an aerosol inhaler may not contain [the] active drug," according to a company press release.
Attorneys for Wheeler's family are checking to see if the inhaler was part of the recall. But Dr. Edmund Donoghue, Cook County's medical examiner, said tests did find the substance in the player's urine, an indication he had used the inhaler the previous day.
Randall Schwartz, an attorney for Wheeler's family, said he believed Wheeler used his inhaler only as needed.
Wheeler was a chronic asthmatic, and Northwestern officials said he had experienced 30 other attacks while playing football the last four years for the Wildcats. Wheeler's mother, Linda Will, said the figure is exaggerated.
| |
|
