Hi Folks!
It's been a dreadful year past
and this one is not starting well with this dreaded Covid virus lurking. However,
I have faith to believe that at some point our lives will improve. Having said
that, I doubt we ever enjoy “normal” as we once knew it. I’ll settle for a new
normal.
Russ and I had a quiet holiday
time and that’s just the way we like it.
Meanwhile, I came across
something someone was kind enough to share so I will share it with you.
WHAT DOES EXPIRATION DATE ON A
BOTTLE OF MEDICATION MEAN TO YOU?
A very interesting read:
Does the expiration date on a
bottle of a medication mean anything?
If a bottle of Tylenol, for
example, says something like "Do not use after June 1998," and it is
August 2002, should you take the Tylenol? Should you discard it? Can you get
hurt if you take it?
Will it simply have lost its
potency and do you no good?
In other words, are drug
manufacturers being honest with us when they put an expiration date on their
medications, or is the practice of dating just another drug industry scam, to
get us to buy new medications when the old ones that purportedly have
"expired" are still perfectly good?
These are the pressing questions
I investigated after my mother-in-law recently said to me, "It doesn't
mean anything," when I pointed out that the Tylenol she was about to take
had "expired" 4 years and a few months ago. I was a bit mocking in my
pronouncement -- feeling superior that I had noticed the chemical corpse in her
cabinet -- but she was equally adamant in her reply, and is generally very sage
about medical issues.
So I gave her a glass of water
with the purportedly "dead" drug, of which she took 2 capsules for a
pain in the upper back. About a half hour later she reported the pain seemed to
have eased up a bit.
I said, "You could be having
a placebo effect," not wanting to simply concede she was right about the
drug, and also not actually knowing what I was talking about.
I was just happy to hear that her
pain had eased, even before we had our evening cocktails and hot tub dip (we
were in "Leisure World," near Laguna Beach, California, where the hot
tub is bigger than most Manhattan apartments, and "Heaven," as generally
portrayed, would be raucous by comparison).
Upon my return to NYC and
high-speed connection, I immediately scoured the medical data bases and general
literature for the answer to my question about drug expiration labeling.
And voila, no sooner than I could
say "Screwed again by the pharmaceutical industry," I had my answer.
Here are the simple facts:
First, the expiration date,
required by law in the United States, beginning in 1979, specifies only the
date the manufacturer guarantees the full potency and safety of the drug -- it
does not mean how long the drug is actually "good" or safe to use.
Second, medical authorities
uniformly say it is safe to take drugs past their expiration date –no matter
how "expired" the drugs purportedly are. Except for possibly the
rarest of exceptions, you won't get hurt and you certainly won't get killed.
Studies show that expired drugs
may lose some of their potency over time, from as little as 5% or less to 50%
or more (though usually much less than the latter). Even 10 years after the
"expiration date," most drugs have a good deal of their original
potency.
One of the largest studies ever
conducted that supports the above points about "expired drug"
labeling was done by the US military 15 years ago, according to a feature story
in the Wall Street Journal (March 29, 2000), reported by Laurie P. Cohen.
The military was sitting on a $1
billion stockpile of drugs and facing the daunting process of destroying and
replacing its supply every 2 to 3 years, so it began a testing program to see
if it could extend the life of its inventory.
The testing, conducted by the US
Food and Drug Administration (FDA), ultimately covered more than 100 drugs,
prescription and over-the-counter.
The results showed, about 90% of
them were safe and effective as long as 15 years past their expiration date.
In light of these results, a
former director of the testing program, Francis Flaherty, said he concluded
that expiration dates put on by manufacturers typically have no bearing on
whether a drug is usable for longer.
Mr. Flaherty noted that a drug
maker is required to prove only that a drug is still good on whatever
expiration date the company chooses to set. The expiration date doesn't mean,
or even suggest, that the drug will stop being effective after that, nor that
it will become harmful.
"Manufacturers put
expiration dates on for marketing, rather than scientific, reasons, " said
Mr. Flaherty, a pharmacist at the FDA until his retirement in 1999.
"It's not profitable for
them to have products on a shelf for 10 years. They want turnover."
The FDA cautioned there isn't
enough evidence from the program, which is weighted toward drugs used during
combat, to conclude most drugs in consumers' medicine cabinets are potent
beyond the expiration date.
Joel Davis, however, a former FDA
expiration-date compliance chief, said that with a handful of exceptions --
notably nitroglycerin, insulin, and some antibiotics -- most drugs are probably
as durable as those the agency has tested for the military.
"Most drugs degrade very
slowly," he said. "In all likelihood, you can take a product you have
at home and keep it for many years." Consider aspirin. Bayer AG puts
2-year or 3-year expiration dates on aspirin and says that it should be
discarded after that.
However, Chris Allen, a vice
president at the Bayer unit that makes aspirin, said the dating is "pretty
conservative"; when Bayer tested 4-year-old aspirin, it remained 100%
effective, he said. So why doesn't Bayer set a 4-year expiration date? Because
the company often changes packaging, and it undertakes "continuous
improvement programs," Mr. Allen said. Each change triggers a need for
more expiration-date testing, and testing each time for a 4-year life would be
impractical. Bayer has never tested aspirin beyond 4 years, Mr. Allen said. But
Jens Carstensen has.
Dr. Carstensen, professor
emeritus at the University of Wisconsin's pharmacy school, who wrote what is
considered the main text on drug stability, said, "I did a study of
different aspirins, and after 5 years, Bayer was still excellent.”
Aspirin, if made correctly, is
very stable.
Okay, I concede. My mother-in-law
was right, once again.
And I was wrong, once again, and
with a wiseacre attitude to boot. Sorry mom.
Now I think I'll take a swig of
the 10-year old, dead package of Alka Seltzer in my medicine chest to ease the
nausea I'm feeling from calculating how many billions of dollars the
pharmaceutical industry bilks out of unknowing consumers every year who discard
perfectly good drugs and buy new ones because they trust the industry's
"expiration date labeling."
Author Unknown
