Recent criticisms of breath analysis for alcohol make the following case of interest. In this instance, the driver claimed that he could not possibly have consumed enough alcohol to be over the legal limit and that the reading must have been due to halothane administered for surgery earlier that day. The case highlights the problem of substances which absorb at the same operational wavelength as alcohol. Halothane is one such substance, but experimental testing demonstrated that clinical concentrations are too low to affect the Camic breath analyser and there is no interaction between ethanol and halothane in breath analysis.
