*DO MEDICINES REALLY EXPIRE OR ARE WE TAKEN FOR A RIDE?*

 

*A Family of Doctors in England & in  Mumbai* have been hammering the point that *medicines don’t expire....*

By Richard Altschuler

If a bottle of Tylenol, (Paracetamol) 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 points I wanted to investigate. 

I immediately scoured the medical databases & general literature for the answer to my question about drug expiration labelling. 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*

*Studies show that expired drugs may lose some of their potency over time*

*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" was done by the US military nearly 18 years ago, according to a feature story inThe 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 programme 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 “even 15 years past their expiration date...”*

In the light of these results, a former *director of the testing programme, Francis Flaherty, said he concluded that expiration dates put on by manufacturers typically have no bearing on whether a drug is usable for longer*

*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 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 programme, which is weighed towards drugs used during combat, to conclude most drugs in consumers' medicine cabinets are potent beyond the expiration date. 

However, *Joel Davis, 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 for many years." 
*when Bayer had tested 4-year-old aspirin, it remained 100% effective*, 

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 (US) 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.*

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.

Contributed by Vinay Kapoor