E-drug: Expired-shelf life medicines (cont)
--------------------------------------------
<In cases where no facilities are available for testing of 'expired'
pharmaceuticals then the best course of action would be to throw them
away if the literature shows that the degradation products produced
are dangerous to human health and the disadvantages will
outweigh the therapeutic effects>.
This is always a good theoretical argument, and perhaps can be dealt
with on an individual drug basis i.e. does drug X have toxic
degradation
products? I have been asked before to produce a list of medicines with
toxic breakdown products and struggled to approach it from that angle.
Apart from the infamous tetracyclines, what other drugs is there
literature on which become "dangerous to human health" due to their
degradation products?
Regards
Douglas Ball
Drug & Toxicology Information Service
Dept of Pharmacy
University of Zimbabwe
PO Box A178 Avondale
Harare, Zimbabwe
Tel: 263-4-790233
Fax: 263-4-790233 or 795019
e-mail: dball@healthnet.zw
[The possibility of toxic degradation products is just one aspect of
the issue. Others are stated in the justification for the guidelines
specification for no expired drugs - double standards, dumping, etc.
http://www.who.int/medicines/teams/par/edm_doccentre.html
BS]
--
Send mail for the `E-Drug' conference to `e-drug@usa.healthnet.org'.
Mail administrative requests to `majordomo@usa.healthnet.org'.
For additional assistance, send mail to: `owner-e-drug@usa.healthnet.org'.