Link Between Vicks and High Mucous?

Only 18 months old, the girl struggled to breathe as her grandparents looked on in the emergency department. Pneumonia and asthma were the likely culprits, but she didn't respond to treatment. Her doctors and grandparents racked their brains for an explanation.

Finally, the grandparents mentioned that because she had appeared to have a cold, "we put Vicks (VapoRub) right under her nose. … Could that be it?"

Could be, says Bruce Rubin, a Wake Forest University pediatrician involved in her case: "We just stopped everything and watched her and she started getting better really quickly."
A longtime mucus researcher, Rubin decided to look into a possible link between inhaling VapoRub and breathing difficulties. He studied the airways of ferrets, which, more than rodents, have airways similar to humans.

First, he added a high dose of VapoRub to laboratory dishes containing windpipes that had been removed from ferrets killed for other research. Those windpipes secreted 63% more mucus than windpipe specimens that had not been incubated with VapoRub, Rubin and his co-authors report today in the journal Chest.

The researchers then applied VapoRub near the opening of a tube inserted into the windpipes of healthy ferrets and ferrets in which they had induced windpipe inflammation with toxins from bacteria, done to mimic a chest infection. For comparison purposes, the researchers applied K-Y jelly instead of VapoRub to a similar group of ferrets.

Compared with the K-Y jelly groups, mucus secretion rose in the VapoRub groups by 14% in the healthy ferrets and 8% in those with inflamed windpipes, which itself increases mucus production. The differences weren't statistically significant, but that could be because of the low number of ferrets studied, Rubin says.

The findings in the live ferrets resembled those in the windpipe specimens exposed to a higher VapoRub dose, he says. "It could explain fully what we saw in the child."
Rubin says problems are unlikely in older kids and adults because their airways are bigger. He says his findings apply to any product applied to the skin that, like VapoRub, contains camphor, menthol and eucalyptus.

David Bernens, a spokesman for VapoRub manufacturer Procter & Gamble, notes that the product's label advises against its use in children under 2 and in the nostrils. The label says it should be rubbed on the chest or throat or on achy muscles.

Besides, Bernens says, VapoRub has been around since 1890, and "we have a fair number of clinical studies that demonstrate both safety and efficacy."

Daniel Craven, a pediatric lung specialist at Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital in Cleveland, says he's not convinced that VapoRub caused the breathing problems in the toddler. "I would still dissuade people from using it because I don't think it works," Craven says. "We need to get a little stronger case to be able to state this is definitely harmful."