E-drug: Re: Wall Street Journal on expired drug (cont'd)
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Another angle on expired drugs:
It is my experience in several countries that there is a real fear of
expired medicines. In Somalia it was extreme. People were much more
interested in whether a drug was expired than whether it was the
appropriate drug. If any adverse events occurred, rumours circulated
quickly that the person had been poisoned by an expired drug. I
won't go into possible reasons for the response but it made it
extremely hard to convince people, for example, that it was better to
use streptomycin for TB that expired yesterday than to miss the doses
until new stock arrived.
By adhering to the rules about providing drugs (by donation or
whatever) with a long shelflife (whatever the policy behind the
dating) it could be less difficult to explain that it is OK to use
drugs beyond their expiry when that need occasionally arises.
Beverley Snell
International Health Unit, Macfarlane Burnet Centre for Medical Research
P O Box 254 Fairfield Australia 3078
Telephone 613 9282 2115 / 9282 2275
Fax 613 9482 3123
Time zone: 10 hours ahead of GMT.
email <bev@burnet.edu.au>
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