[BITList] MEDICATIONS DON'T EXPIRE!

[x50type at cox.net]

Frank

Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide agrees in general!

http://www.health.harvard.edu/fhg/updates/update1103a.shtml

ct

From: franka 
Sent: Friday, May 11, 2012 8:06 AM
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: [BITList] MEDICATIONS DON'T EXPIRE!


at your own risk, just forwarding the post 
frank


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  > MEDICATIONS DON'T EXPIRE!

  > Some reassuring and very useful information...
  > By Richard Altschuler
  > 
  > 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 databases 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 far 
  > 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 liquid 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 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 has 
  > 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 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 labelling."






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