It's Official Expiration Dates On Meds Mean Nothing :)

[mnemosyne]

@Napier

How about the distilled water I bought - it’s got expiration dates on it - do I have to use it by then or toss it?

Common sense says that for an unopened bottle, there is no risk. Except that, personally, I don’t know what, if anything, leaches out of the plastic. The thing to remember about expiration dates is not “It’s unsafe” but rather “we don’t have any data whatsoever to prove that it is safe” . No one has tested it, and there is neither a legal or (IMHO) ethical requirement to do so. These sorts of things are usually on the scale of years. Use it, or lose it, as they say!

Well, I think expiration dates on water are probably nonsense, but it points to a real problem with things like this. (…)

I have personally worked on a product, DrugA (at the time, only in initial clinical trials) that broke down into DrugB which had different enough pharmacological action that it wouldn’t and couldn’t treat the symptoms/illness that DrugA was trying to treat. The trick was getting a formulation with a long enough shelf life to treat the intended illness. I left the company and don’t know how it worked out, but it was perceived as a rather extreme, last-ditch effort to recoup on a butt-load of research and investment money. I think more than one research paper was written regarding the sensitivity and potential of DrugA.

There seem to be forces that cause unnecessary restrictions and warnings to get added to things, and that undermines the credibility of the whole system.

The FDA/HPFBI/[equivalents in other countries] tend to be rather conservative in these things. The rule of science applies: PROVE IT. Without data, it’s very difficult to get approbation on a new drug, but it’s very hard to separate the data from environmental factors in clinical trials. The cliché of “better safe than sorry” applies (at least as a motivation for you average pharma company workforce). The restrictions may be too severe, but when people start ignoring them and taking drugs against what is indicated (e.g. crushing/scoring them, taking them at a frequency not recommended/with alcohol/[with contraindicated drugs]. etc), the fact remains that there is no data to support what they are doing. It might be safe but no one knows if it is. No one has looked, no one has tested it, an no one ever will.

I have a Material Safety Data Sheet for Borden’s skin cream that says to avoid prolonged contact, and one for rubbing alcohol that says to seek a doctor’s care if you get any of it on you. If the references say everything is dangerous, then the references don’t really say anything about danger, and there is no way to find out what is dangerous other than rumors and experimentation, and the system has ruined its own goal.

I don’t know what Borden’s skin cream is, and despite such an exciting Friday night that I’m responding to this post, I don’t care to look it up.

As for isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol, MSDS documentation tends to refer to more-or-less pure isopropyl alcohol rather than what you have at home which is likely in the 70% range. Skin irritation can occur; I’d invite you to ask one of my former co-workers if this wasn’t a public internet message board! MSDS lists the worse that can happen, so that if such symptoms occur, you can react appropriately. It is a worst-case-scenario approach. It is far from perfect, because for most substances, we don’t even know what they can do to the body, but the point of an MSDS is to list what we know, so that you can prepare for the worst. These are chemicals. They fuck with your body. I’d rather be informed of that than to be surprised by it.

I think it is not so unreasonable to conclude that all expiration dates are insignificant if you see what the OP saw, though the conclusion might be wrong. Thanks to anybody who is actually trying to inject real and useful information into the system.

Companies get fined/shut down pretty often. If what the OP claims is true, it goes against everything I’ve seen, learned and been taught at the companies I have worked for. It is illegal - flat out against federal criminal law - in Canada and in the USA (to my knowledge). Probably elsewhere as well.

I can’t believe people who think expiration dates are insignificant. These are chemicals, medicine, whose sole purpose is to change how the body is behaving. That’s what drugs do. Is it really a surprise that putting this stuff into your body might have weird results? Is it really a surprise that with time, exposure to sunlight/heat/cold/acids/bases/light/etc chemical reactions might occur and these drugs might degrade? Is it really a surprise that the degradation products might have a significant pharmacological effects? Fuck the money-making side of it; it is irrelevant to this discussion. CHEMISTRY HAPPENS. And it can fuck you up. Why take that chance?

I worked in the industry. I know, from a university degree and work experience and the multitude of science available that drugs can minimize symptoms of a disease, or even cure one. But side effects, taking drugs against indication, taking drugs with contraindicated substances, expired and degraded drugs etc can kill you, or cause severe side effects, or at the least leave you no better off than without the drug.

Fuck the money. It’s not about the fucking money.

It’s about your health.

Think about what you are consuming. Think about the fact that there is likely at least a decade of scientific data behind the instructions
on the drug packaging, and that that data has been scientifically proven, even it if it’s within a rather narrow window. Companies don’t want to hurt you because that will hurt the bottom line. Look at Merck, and Vioxx, which had to be pulled because (in essence) it was being used so frequently off-label that more people than expected had side effects. It’s a valid drug*; the media killed it.

But chemistry happens and some things are unpredictable. Why add more unknowns to that? To save a few bucks? Revisit your priorities.
*and no, I have never worked for Merck

[mnemosyne]

Sorry…blame the Pinot Noir; the above post comes across as rather aggressive, and I think I’ve mixed topics from another thread into it as well. I don’t intend any attacks directed at Napier or anyone else in particular. I’ve just had a shitty month and I’m grumpy right now and I’m taking it out in my posts, it seems!

Then again, on re-read, my point stands. These are chemicals. They change your body’s behaviour. They degrade over time, even if that time is very, very long. It might be about money for the company, but it’s about your health first. Stick in the realm of the proven. It’s safer there.

And if anyone can figure out what company the OP works for; avoid their products. Personally, I’m hoping it’s not Apotex (I have friends there, though in Toronto).

[Boyo_Jim]

@mhendo

Maybe, instead of making a few bucks working for the company, the OP can get some whistleblower reward from the government.

This is exactly what I was thinking, especially since as a temp, you hardly have a career risk to worry about.

[Boyo_Jim]

Here is the FDA’s ‘Reporting Problems’ web page. Unfortunately I don’t see anything about rewards. Of course, screwing your soon to be former employer is its own reward.

There is a toll-free number: 1-800-332-1088

I search the site for “whistleblower” but all the references I looked at were about how FDA employees can report the FDA.

[StGermain]

I work for a company that distributes drugs for about 70 different drug manufacturers. We are very aware and track the lot numbers, expiry dates, temps the drugs are kept at, all these things. When we receive returns or have expired product, they all go to be incinerated at high temps, as hazardous waste. There’s just too much that’s supposed to be tracked. Every bottle that goes out, and every bottle that comes in, are accounted for by lot number. We have mandatory cGMP training to emphasize the importance of all this. We don’t manufacture or package the drugs, but I can’t imagine any company doing this.

StG

[Nava]

@campp

The FDA would love to hear that story. Something is wrong with their documentation system, and that’s a major concern right there.

I don’t know what company does Markxxx work for, nor should I, but one of the sources of friction between the “chemical” and “pharma” halves of a company I worked for was that the chemists actually expected the expiration dates to mean something; the pharma folk didn’t. The pharma side would do things like repackage “old” lots, giving them “new” expiration dates. They spent enormous amounts of money making sure that the dates on the blisters matched the dates on the boxes (the pills would be made in one factory, blistered in a second and boxed in a third) and that the language in the blister/bottle label, prospectus and box matched. Making sure that they sold pills that weren’t five years old, OTOH, was not seen as relevant.

[mnemosyne]

Wow. The lawsuit potential is HUGE if any of that is true and can be proven, never mind the enormous fines against the companies and potential criminal prosecution of the guys in charge of the company!

In 2002, Schering-Plough was fined $500 million USD for failing to comply with cGMP requirements in manufacturing, QA, equipment, packaging, laboratories and labelling. They had to suspend production on a bunch of products while they fixed the very extensive problems in their organization. I like this quote from the article I liked to: “Manufacturers who choose to wait until FDA investigators find violations rather than policing themselves will find that they have made a poor and costly decision.”

[Nava]

Oh, but they do comply with the paperwork. Paperwork, they have mountains thereof, and the shiniest, newest, most current machinery, and 8 electronic signatures to record a single analytical result. What they do not comply with is the… decency laws.

[rbroome]

I am not so sure of the violation. If the pills all have genuine lifetimes of (say) 5 years and the company can document that, is it illegal to put a 3 year or 4 year expiration date on the box? It might be just good marketing. The “lifetime” of a drug is set by the company and as long as the drugs are safe and effective up to that date, what is the problem? Of course the customer/insurance company is screwed, but no one should be surprised by that.