On Friday, two Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials released a statement on the agency’s website, revealing that asthma patients using Advair, Symbicort, Serevent and Foradil as treatment ran high death risk if they did not stop taking the drugs.

Another FDA official said that Advair and Symbicort were safe to be used by adults, but that Serevent and Foradil should not be given to asthma sufferers aged 17 or younger.

Director of the division of pulmonary and allergy products at the federal agency Dr. Badrul A. Chowdhury informed that banning the meds would be an extreme measure which could prompt people to appeal to other drugs that were as risky as the aforementioned four, adding that the death risk the latter posed was a small one.

The FDA has announced that the following week, on Wednesday and Thursday, they would be assembling a committee to shed light upon the disagreement that has arisen between their officials.

The Advair drug registered sales of $6.9 billion last year, while this year it could come to bring in profit amounting to $8 billion, which would make it one of the biggest-selling drugs in the world, as well as GlaxoSmithKline’s top-selling medicine. The latter company is also the one marketing Serevent, which has produced revenue of $538 million in sales in 2007.

As for the other two asthma drugs, Symbicort and Foradil, they are sold by AstraZeneca and Novartis, respectively.

Currently, approximately 9 percent of the prescriptions for Advair are issued to asthma sufferers age 17 and under, according to GlaxoSmithKline.