As I understand it, the wrong combination of tumor suppressant/promoter genes getting switched off/on gives you cancer.
Exposure to some things can cause more mutations or hinder your body's error-correction systems, sometimes to extreme degrees. It is a numbers game, though.
what's crazy to me is how terrible of a track record big pharma has in being even moderately uncorrupted, and yet when it comes to vaccines, sprinkle in a bit of fear and suddenly we're supposed to trust their studies and superbowl commercials.
Except we aren't just trusting the pharma companies. In the case of COVID vaccines, it is one of the most broadly studied things on the planet at this point.
If we had this much money and this many eyes on studying and testing Zantac, I have no doubt they wouldn't have been able to keep the cancer risks secret.
>Is that relevant if most people who get the jab also later get covid?
You do realize that the whole point of a vaccine is to either prevent or improve the symptoms of a disease right? So if you're nearly guaranteed to get covid then you definitely want to suffer a smaller number of complications from a vaccine and then reduced post-vaccine covid complications versus the much worse complications of un-vaccinated covid. The math is different if you're unlikely to catch covid but as you admit yourself that isn't the case nowadays.
The big ones where Johnson & Johnson/Janssen had a risk of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome to the point of being effectivelly discontinued. Pfizer and Moderna also have a risk of myocarditis. There's also plenty of other studies covering the various other risks such as https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36055877/.
Which can all be found after 30 seconds of Googling or simply by paying attention to all the news these got over the last few years.
The thrombosis was reported by the exact medical authorities that antivaxxers claim are hushing up the truth, using the exact diagnostic and reporting system they claim doesn’t work. The system worked exactly as intended.
The myocarditis is caused by the same spike proteins that are in the virus itself, and the relative risk of myocarditis from an actual Covid infection versus the vaccine is many times higher.
Which can all be found after 30 seconds of Googling or simply by paying attention to all the news these got over the last few years.
Yes. It boggles my mind that the simple fact that the spike protein seems to cause the myocarditis and all the anti-vaxers can't seem to put 2 and 2 together that a full on infection of COVID all over your body is going to be orders of magnitude worse for that exact same symptom. And that's not even taking into account the myriad of other negative side effects of a severe COVID infection.
As mentioned by the CDC, boys between the ages of 12-17 have a much higher risk of getting myocarditis from the COVID vaccine (about 1 in 5000), and this risk diminishes as you get older. No one knows why, and no one appears to be studying why.
Vaccines work by stimulating one's immune system response in ways similar to infection, they are literally designed to trigger the same immuno response in a safe way to prevent severe illness from future exposure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine
I mentioned the vaccine, and you're talking about COVID-19, which is not what I was talking about.
> Vaccines work by stimulating one's immune system response in ways similar to infection
Wrong. This is not how the MRNA vaccine works. The only thing that the MRNA vaccines produce is the spike protein, and it's bound with an additional part so that even the spike protein can't be active. It doesn't deliver the same immune response as it does from a COVID 19 infection at all.
All of which doesn't answer the question why are 12-17 year olds suffering a 1 in 5000 chance of getting myocarditis from the vaccine?
Myocarditis was only found to be slightly higher in 12-17 year olds with the moderna vaccine. The Pfizer and others did not. Presumably because Pfizer is a lower dose. But of course, this is all moot because myocarditis is usually mild and does not require hospitalization and there are myriad of other symptoms that you can get from COVID. Its not as if myocarditis is the only negative side effect of catching COVID.
Just because you don’t know why doesn’t mean “no one knows why”. Myocarditis is a well known risk factor in vaccines and the Covid studies explicitly tested different dosages to determine the lowest effective dose to minimize that risk.
It’s pretty impressive how weird antivaxxers have convinced millions of people to not take vaccines based on their ignorance of the subject but here we are.
No it's not a well known risk factor at all. Especially not the likes of 1 in 5000, and there's no explanation why it's only affected kids 12-17 and it decreases to almost nil as one gets older.
What do you mean by "knows why"? Seriously - there's "no one knows why and can't point to anything at all that my be related", and there's "...and we don't know why the xyz protein doesn't match our models and we're not sure what's going on in the 4890th pair of the dna that generates it"?
Both fit "no one knows why" - and that's the problem with such statements.
If you're that concerned about things doctor's don't know about medication side effects then you probably shouldn't take any medicine ever. Almost every single one of them has some random side effect or risk that no one has yet figured out the exact mechanism for. Most aren't even quantified in random studies but simply noted and then utterly ignored. The vaccines being studied so much is why we have actual data on these rare side effects unlike most medications.
Exactly. COVID vaccines are the most studied medical treatment in the world. No one is asking you to blindly trust anyone, but if you are going to question something, be aware of the amount of work being done to either prove or disprove claims.
If you on principle refuse to take any medication or vaccine due to the fact that they almost all have rare, unstudied or potential side effects then that's totally fair. The human body is a very complex thing and every single one of us is different so it's basically impossible to truly know if a drug will have no rare side effects for some sub group. Or at least do extensive deep research on every single medication you take including supplements and over the counter things.
If you only do this for the covid vaccine due to reading too much fearmongering then that just means you're irrational.
> I would think that, with the number of people who received it, any issues would have been sussed out by now
A large sample size means less if the problems are longer-term in nature such as an increase in cancer rates down the road or problems with fertility, which might take more time to fully detect and understand.
And a large sample size means little without a control group: yet if some people had their way, there'd be no control group left.
That doesn't account for long term side effects, that may only be seen years, or decades, later.
Of course, catching covid may also have unknown long term side effects, like how some who caught Spanish flu went on to develop encephalitis lethargica.
Vaccinated or not you're part of what is effectively the largest post marketing clinical study, either as the treatment or control group. Science is fun like that.
Interesting counterpoint is that a judge recently lambasted the entire body of scientific evidence linking ranitidine (Zantac) to cancer and tossed all the cases.
If they could find a way to ensure the impurity didn’t exist, I would certainly buy ranitidine again. I found it was the most effective antacid for me.
The judge did not make conclusions about "the entire body of scientific evidence", only the evidence presented to them. Nor did they make conclusions on whether contaminates in Zantac were cancerous. She concluded there was insufficient evidence to prove that Zatnac caused the plaintiff's cancer. And that does not mean that the evidence doesn't exist - if the plaintiff's attorneys failed to present a sufficient legal case, that doesn't mean the science is wrong or doesn't exist.
Further, one judge is not an arbiter of whether science is sound or not. In fact, the American legal system is infamous for its persistent reliance on fraudulent forensic techniques even well after there's widespread consensus that they're unreliable if not outright fraudulent.
Polygraphs, writing analysis, fiber analysis, hair analysis, fingerprint analysis, drug-sniffing dogs...all have long been found to be far less reliable than courts treat them to be.
The latter is probably the most egregious example, with the Supreme Court agreeing that such dogs are actually worse than a coin flip in terms of correctly indicating a "hit" on drugs...and then shrugged and said dogs were still a valid legal basis for further, more invasive searching.
It's not just that it causes cancer, but it's that improper storage (heat exposure) increases the risk of it causing cancer, and when informed of that, GSK decided it was not worth doing anything about it.
> GSK's leadership was warned on several occasions about the storage issue, but it opted against making any changes to existing plans.
In a way, this makes it worse, because they could have taken action to limit the risk to people, but chose not to, presumably to save money or to avoid bad publicity.
I read that it is only carcinogenic if stored improperly, which was one of the reasons it stayed available for as long as it did. The article doesn't seem to counter this idea. Do you have any references on the not heat-exposed risks?
My understanding is that the carcinogen (NDMA) builds up over time even with storage at recommended temperatures, though increased temperature makes it build up much faster. That's what the FDA said when they pulled it from the market.
How old your ranitidine would have to be to have too-high NDMA level without higher heat, I haven't seen any specifics around that.
I imagine they could have instead instituted limits about temperature of storage and transport, and chop down the expiration dates, and add big warnings for consumers to actually respect the dates, not keep them in cars, etc... though the market reality that there are several other H2 blockers out there that haven't been shown to have the NDMA issue, not to mention PPIs, likely meant that just pulling ranitidine was the better call.
I think even that was seen as a potential “guilty conscience” risk if things went into litigation, so best to just let people suffer and die, that’s less expensive.
This sort of "we refuse how to tell you to get better results because then some ambulance chaser could use that" behavior is all over the corporate world (albeit less in B2B than B2C).
if you have to sell your OTC medication in a refrigerator, your sales will drop a lot. It's not somewhere people think to look, and the impression is that it's perishable. Which people can appreciate for something like a steak, but not their "safe and usual" medications.
The few batches we've bought have been legit (Ranimax 150, product of India), but QA with these sorts of vendors isn't exactly guaranteed (for all I know, your first purchase would be reconstituted sawdust and rat droppings). I'm not comfortable giving standing referrals to any fly-by-night operation.
I just mentioned it as a possibility because for those with bad-enough GERD, there are no retail options, and the assumption is that the product has been recalled worldwide. Not so!
Nexium, or esomeprazole, works well, or better than Zantac, and can be purchased OTC (at least here in the UK). It’s pricey but usually lasts a couple of days or more so it stretches further.
AKA acetaminophen AKA Tylenol. On the safety scale, it's dangerous stuff. Profitable not only because it works, and is perceived as safe, but the long term side effects are even more profitable.
I used to take ranitidine... one day, it suddenly stopped being available at pharmacies. My physician switched me to famotidine, a similar medication, because there were "supply issues" for the foreseeable future.
That was almost two years ago. This is the first I'm hearing about this. So for all I know, I was exposed to an unknown amount of carcinogen for years without being told anything about it even after that information was discovered.
You were possibly poisoned, probably intentionally, by an entity that intended to and did profit by it. You may get a small amount of money if you have the luck and the resources to capitalize on it.
There's nothing unique or novel about this situation. Is it surprisingly that it happened or just surprising that it happened to you? This is what we do son, this is what american is for. This is the system working as intended.
It's not surprising - I know the points you're making and I agree with them. I'm posing a question I think we should discuss. What should my recourse be?
In reality, the absolute harm done to me (if any) is probably very limited. Maybe my lifelong risk of cancer has gone up by some quite small amount. The greater harm is damage to my trust in the organizations that produce my necessary medications.
So the recourse is probably not giving me anything extravagant, it's probably more about some sort of fix to oversight, regulation, corporate penalties paid for this, etc. None of which is likely to happen as a result of a lawsuit, except maaaybe the last one.
Ask your doctor what he knew at the time? I'd be wondering what oaths he took to prevent him from telling you the full extent of the supply chain issue.
> Intense public scrutiny on Zantac started in 2019, when an online pharmacy found high levels of a likely carcinogen in the drug and its generics.
And the linked article says:
> Valisure discovered the link of Zantac and its generics to the carcinogen NDMA during its routine testing of every batch of every medication, and first notified the FDA of its initial findings in June of 2019. On September 13th, Valisure filed a detailed petition with the Food and Drug Administration asking the agency to recall all products containing ranitidine.
How in the world is it profitable for an online pharmacy to do this? It's great, but honestly who would pay extra to an online pharmacy to do this testing? Would most people even believe an online pharmacy that said that they did such testing? I'd love to know how they survive.
I've ordered medication from them because they test to make sure that there's no impurities. It's not that much more expensive and I would gladly pay to know there's no extra chemicals in there that could give me cancer.
Wow, I love that they do this. A few online nootropics suppliers do the same for the supplements they provide but I guess "legit" pharmacies just trust whatever they get from their suppliers usually.
Yeah, at least ~5 years ago, even the main one everyone raved about had some pretty shady practices when they alleged to have "tested every batch in house".
Note that they sold their pharmacy business, but claim to be continuing the testing for the new owner:
"The company has since sold its pharmacy operation to concentrate only on quality and safety testing. It continues to test products for the pharmacy’s new owner, Medly, along with other business clients looking to certify for their customers that what they’re buying is legitimate."
From https://www.consumerreports.org/product-safety/valisure-foun...
All those mergers, including with my go-to for supplements, Pharmaca, in such a short time. How did it turn into such a dumpster fire so quickly? I feel like there's got to be a story.
Online pharmacies that specialize in generic drugs are at risk of having their supplies switched or contaminated because they order from manufacturers with reputations a notch below the big pharma brands whose packaging and product are sourced through a chain of custody that makes switching them out for something else a lot harder.
This means that they have to do some inbound quality control to ensure that what they believe they are selling really is what they are selling.
This is not quite right. I don't think any other pharmacy tests what they dispense. It's expensive, difficult, and the FDA doesn't seem to appreciate that their risk management strategy is being second-guessed. They recently issued a long warning letter to Valisure for doing it [0].
Note that ValisureRx (consumer pharmacy that dispensed lot-tested drugs) was sold to Medley Pharmacy, which just folded. Valisure is now just a testing lab.
Finally, it's not just a chain of custody thing. Even big generic brands and name-brands source a huge amount of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) from China and India.
> How in the world is it profitable for an online pharmacy to do this? It's great, but honestly who would pay extra to an online pharmacy to do this testing?
I suspect it's not that they go out of their way to do extra testing, it's that they don't necessarily trust suppliers but willing to eat the cost of testing + risk of bad inputs because they still net ahead compared to more reputable but expensive suppliers.
It looks like it wasn't profitable enough for them, Valisure doesn't seem to run their online pharmacy anymore.
As of 2021, it appears they pivoted to running the lab as a service for other companies. I found one online pharmacy that was using Valisure (Medly.com) but it appears to have gone bankrupt, assets acquired by Walgreens and shut down.
I don't know UK law but I very much doubt they're much different from the US in this respect. The article doesn't name those responsible, it just names the corporation (GSK) they're hiding behind. It's unlikely those responsible will be affected by this in any significant way, especially since this has been going on for 40 years and many of those responsible are probably retired. The cost will be paid by workers getting laid off, and by shareholders, as it always is in these cases, while those responsible will move on with 40 years of pocketed profits.
The cancer causing agent in Zantac is a N-nitrosamine.
These are the same class of chemicals that are found in cured meat and they are present in an awful lot of food because they are produced during fermentation. Bacon, beer, even a side product of drinking water treatment.
I was telling a friend how unfortunate it is that I live in the south and kept a bottle of this in my car for over a year. I have pretty bad heartburn issues and used to take it only on occasion. Maybe I'll get $35 from a settlement to go with my cancer one day.
Aspartame breaks down in to methanol (which is then metabolized in to formaldehyde) when heated.
This sounds bad, but it's worth keeping in mind that plain tomato juice has something like 6x methanol in it than diet sodas. The quantities involved are tiny. Aspartame is metabolized in the same way when consumed cold. The big reason soda manufacturers are concerned about heat is that it loses its sweetness.
(all that being said, it's probably still a good idea to avoid anyway)
Easiest method? Keep them in a cooler/fridge that's cold enough but still within the range listed on your medications packaging. Especially if you've already invested in a small solar setup to keep a 12v fridge going.
Its not ideal but even just keeping them in a small drink ice chest in a shaded/insulated area and keeping the van ventilated will help keep temps down.
Im assuming you're employed but live in S. Cal. Some of my suggestions assume that.
Thoughts:
- You really need a cigarette lighter mini fridge. They're less than $100 at home depot. Note, they suck, but you don't have alternatives and you'll be able to have a cold beer occasionally.
Careful not to drain the car battery, and keep it in a shaded part of your vehicle.
- I find that there can large T differences in the car. Under the seat is fairly cool, and the T is more stable.
Keep your meds and the mini-fridge there, preferably by the floor vent if equipped.
- Does your van have windows or is it a workman's van? Glass is your enemy. You probably cant afford to just buy a van, but a white windowless Transit van is better than a Pacifica.
- Use white bed sheets to cover your interior and shade everything.
- you probably do this, but solar windshield covers.
- Keep your windows open a crack. Really just a crack small enough to keep even the rain out. Convection is huge. This is most important at day if crime is locally a problem.
- Paint it white.
- If you can, take advantage of the van's mobility and move to fairer weather throughout the year. If you have to stay in the LA region, go north just across the mesa (?) towards S. Barbara. Much cooler there. Id set myself up in Montecito myself.
I realize you mentioned the South because of the heat and not the food, but as a fellow Southerner who used to also have bad heartburn, may I recommend cutting out ice and sweet tea, if you use them? God, I love them, but I realized after long suffering with heartburn that iced drinks and sugar in my tea was killing my stomach. Cutting these out means I'm now the only member of my family not constantly popping Tums.
Interestingly, all the Southern grannies knew this: they distrusted ice and made their tea with a pinch of baking soda, although this does change the flavor a bit.
I certainly learned over time what my triggers are. As I've gotten older, anything bad for my body ultimately makes me sick in some way. I have it bad enough now that I'm gonna get it for any reason, it's even become a problem that occurs when I haven't eaten after a while (12+ hr).
Luckily I don't like sweet tea or other full sugar drinks (you can pry diet coke from my dead hands). Hadn't heard about the ice thing though.
My biggest triggers are fatty foods, tomato, chocolate, and palm oil.
The people who made the actual decision may even be retired, and won't even get a slap on the wrist.
Remember: GSK didn't make an unethical decision, people did. Letting those people hide behind a corporation means that workers and shareholders pay the consequences for decisions that were only made by a few people.
Anyone know why famotidine, a similar med (aka Pepcid) doesn't have this problem? Or does it, and we just haven't heard about it? I took famotidine for years, ironically I kept hearing during that time that Zantac was more effective, but never switched.
It's a different class of drug. Zantac is a PPI (proton pump inhibitor). Other drugs in the same PPI class are Prilosec (Omeprazole) and Nexium (Esomeprazole), and while not recalled, could have similar problems.
Pepcid (famotidine) and Tagamet (Cimetidine) are H2 blockers, another class of heartburn medication, that hasn't shown the same issues.
On the other hand, untreated chronic reflux is a big driver for stomach and esophageal cancers. So it's possible that having taken Zantac for a long time was less risky cancer-wise than not taking anything.
GSK didn't make decisions, people made decisions, and those people need to be named and held responsible.
Putting this on GSK means that the people who knowingly sold a cancer-causing drug while hiding the risks get away without any consequences. Given this went on for 40 years, probably a lot of those people are retired, and won't even lose pay, bonuses, share price, etc.
Meanwhile, assuming this leads to any sort of lawsuits, fines, and lost sales, the people who will pay the price if GSK is held responsible will be shareholders, who likely had no visibility into these decisions, and workers who will be laid off, again without having had any role in these decisions.
This system is fundamentally broken. It's not just a small loophole that can be closed: the entire thing is a loophole that allows sociopaths to exit with the profits of wrongdoing while workers and shareholders pay the consequences. We need to stop letting bad people hide behind corporations.
Name the people responsible, and hold them responsible.
Occasionally dissolving anti-social corporations, instead of preserving jobs and protecting shareholders, would probably give remaining corporations at least a little incentive to keep their activities aligned with the goals of wider society.
Punishing those who aren't responsible harder doesn't solve the problem.
In theory shareholders have the power to prevent this sort of thing, but they don't have the visibility into the daily goings on at a company to see when things like this happen.
Likewise, the vast majority of workers had nothing to do with this decision.
In a more general sense, I do think it's healthy to let companies fail rather than subsidizing non-working business models. But as a means of disincentivizing bad behavior, it's totally ineffective.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadOh wait. Maybe they would. everything gives you cancer now, doesn't it?
Yes, but only in California
Exposure to some things can cause more mutations or hinder your body's error-correction systems, sometimes to extreme degrees. It is a numbers game, though.
If we had this much money and this many eyes on studying and testing Zantac, I have no doubt they wouldn't have been able to keep the cancer risks secret.
>The same complications exist in far higher rates with COVID itself.
Is that relevant if most people who get the jab also later get covid?
You do realize that the whole point of a vaccine is to either prevent or improve the symptoms of a disease right? So if you're nearly guaranteed to get covid then you definitely want to suffer a smaller number of complications from a vaccine and then reduced post-vaccine covid complications versus the much worse complications of un-vaccinated covid. The math is different if you're unlikely to catch covid but as you admit yourself that isn't the case nowadays.
Which can all be found after 30 seconds of Googling or simply by paying attention to all the news these got over the last few years.
The myocarditis is caused by the same spike proteins that are in the virus itself, and the relative risk of myocarditis from an actual Covid infection versus the vaccine is many times higher.
Which can all be found after 30 seconds of Googling or simply by paying attention to all the news these got over the last few years.
This is so false. Took literally one Google search to find a study about "why" and the relationship to myocarditis and Covid 19: https://www.heart.org/en/news/2022/08/22/covid-19-infection-...
Viral infections are one of the top causes for myocarditis. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/myocarditis/s...
Vaccines work by stimulating one's immune system response in ways similar to infection, they are literally designed to trigger the same immuno response in a safe way to prevent severe illness from future exposure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine
> Vaccines work by stimulating one's immune system response in ways similar to infection
Wrong. This is not how the MRNA vaccine works. The only thing that the MRNA vaccines produce is the spike protein, and it's bound with an additional part so that even the spike protein can't be active. It doesn't deliver the same immune response as it does from a COVID 19 infection at all.
All of which doesn't answer the question why are 12-17 year olds suffering a 1 in 5000 chance of getting myocarditis from the vaccine?
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/results/NCT04405076
It’s pretty impressive how weird antivaxxers have convinced millions of people to not take vaccines based on their ignorance of the subject but here we are.
Both fit "no one knows why" - and that's the problem with such statements.
Also each company is independent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSK_plc
All you're doing is saying that bad things happened instead of comparing it to the number of non bad things.
Look at the COX-2 inhibitors as well. They were on the market for almost a decade before the increased risk of heart attack popped up in the data.
If you on principle refuse to take any medication or vaccine due to the fact that they almost all have rare, unstudied or potential side effects then that's totally fair. The human body is a very complex thing and every single one of us is different so it's basically impossible to truly know if a drug will have no rare side effects for some sub group. Or at least do extensive deep research on every single medication you take including supplements and over the counter things.
If you only do this for the covid vaccine due to reading too much fearmongering then that just means you're irrational.
Every pill of ranitidine would undergo this process in storage, if I understand correctly. Yet it took 40 years for it to finally be confirmed.
Even worse, I have taken ranitidine that I had in storage (not in heat) for more than a year! So this news is all the more alarming.
A large sample size means less if the problems are longer-term in nature such as an increase in cancer rates down the road or problems with fertility, which might take more time to fully detect and understand.
And a large sample size means little without a control group: yet if some people had their way, there'd be no control group left.
Of course, catching covid may also have unknown long term side effects, like how some who caught Spanish flu went on to develop encephalitis lethargica.
Vaccinated or not you're part of what is effectively the largest post marketing clinical study, either as the treatment or control group. Science is fun like that.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/judge-dismisses-ranitidi...
If they could find a way to ensure the impurity didn’t exist, I would certainly buy ranitidine again. I found it was the most effective antacid for me.
1: "Anticholinergic Accumulation: A Slumbering Interaction between Drugs and Food Supplements" https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bcpt.12437
2: Chart of medicines with high ACB scores (higher is worse) - you will recognize some of these, such as allergy and anti-nausea meds: (pdf warning) https://corumpharmacy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Anticho...
Everything will kill you, no need to get worked up about the infinitesimal risk.
https://www.bmj.com/content/321/7260/572.1
17% vs 77%
Further, one judge is not an arbiter of whether science is sound or not. In fact, the American legal system is infamous for its persistent reliance on fraudulent forensic techniques even well after there's widespread consensus that they're unreliable if not outright fraudulent.
Polygraphs, writing analysis, fiber analysis, hair analysis, fingerprint analysis, drug-sniffing dogs...all have long been found to be far less reliable than courts treat them to be.
The latter is probably the most egregious example, with the Supreme Court agreeing that such dogs are actually worse than a coin flip in terms of correctly indicating a "hit" on drugs...and then shrugged and said dogs were still a valid legal basis for further, more invasive searching.
> GSK's leadership was warned on several occasions about the storage issue, but it opted against making any changes to existing plans.
In a way, this makes it worse, because they could have taken action to limit the risk to people, but chose not to, presumably to save money or to avoid bad publicity.
It's paywalled, but this seems to be referenced by a lot of reports:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-02/carcinoge...
Maybe someone else has the actual source.
How old your ranitidine would have to be to have too-high NDMA level without higher heat, I haven't seen any specifics around that.
I imagine they could have instead instituted limits about temperature of storage and transport, and chop down the expiration dates, and add big warnings for consumers to actually respect the dates, not keep them in cars, etc... though the market reality that there are several other H2 blockers out there that haven't been shown to have the NDMA issue, not to mention PPIs, likely meant that just pulling ranitidine was the better call.
I have so many major health problems that quite frankly I'll probably be dead before I could get cancer from this stuff.
Nothing else on the market compares.
The few batches we've bought have been legit (Ranimax 150, product of India), but QA with these sorts of vendors isn't exactly guaranteed (for all I know, your first purchase would be reconstituted sawdust and rat droppings). I'm not comfortable giving standing referrals to any fly-by-night operation.
I just mentioned it as a possibility because for those with bad-enough GERD, there are no retail options, and the assumption is that the product has been recalled worldwide. Not so!
It’s not over-the-counter where I live, but the adult (tablet) version is.
That was almost two years ago. This is the first I'm hearing about this. So for all I know, I was exposed to an unknown amount of carcinogen for years without being told anything about it even after that information was discovered.
What's my recourse?
A lawsuit, like the thousands mentioned in the article.
There's nothing unique or novel about this situation. Is it surprisingly that it happened or just surprising that it happened to you? This is what we do son, this is what american is for. This is the system working as intended.
In reality, the absolute harm done to me (if any) is probably very limited. Maybe my lifelong risk of cancer has gone up by some quite small amount. The greater harm is damage to my trust in the organizations that produce my necessary medications.
So the recourse is probably not giving me anything extravagant, it's probably more about some sort of fix to oversight, regulation, corporate penalties paid for this, etc. None of which is likely to happen as a result of a lawsuit, except maaaybe the last one.
And the linked article says:
> Valisure discovered the link of Zantac and its generics to the carcinogen NDMA during its routine testing of every batch of every medication, and first notified the FDA of its initial findings in June of 2019. On September 13th, Valisure filed a detailed petition with the Food and Drug Administration asking the agency to recall all products containing ranitidine.
How in the world is it profitable for an online pharmacy to do this? It's great, but honestly who would pay extra to an online pharmacy to do this testing? Would most people even believe an online pharmacy that said that they did such testing? I'd love to know how they survive.
https://digitalhealth.modernhealthcare.com/finance/medly-sel...
This means that they have to do some inbound quality control to ensure that what they believe they are selling really is what they are selling.
Note that ValisureRx (consumer pharmacy that dispensed lot-tested drugs) was sold to Medley Pharmacy, which just folded. Valisure is now just a testing lab.
Finally, it's not just a chain of custody thing. Even big generic brands and name-brands source a huge amount of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) from China and India.
[0] https://www.fda.gov/media/163682/download
I suspect it's not that they go out of their way to do extra testing, it's that they don't necessarily trust suppliers but willing to eat the cost of testing + risk of bad inputs because they still net ahead compared to more reputable but expensive suppliers.
As of 2021, it appears they pivoted to running the lab as a service for other companies. I found one online pharmacy that was using Valisure (Medly.com) but it appears to have gone bankrupt, assets acquired by Walgreens and shut down.
https://www.businessinsider.com/walgreens-buys-medly-pharmac...
https://corporateeurope.org/en/2021/05/big-pharmas-lobbying-...
I wouldn't hold my breath that any other country will prosecute either.
These are the same class of chemicals that are found in cured meat and they are present in an awful lot of food because they are produced during fermentation. Bacon, beer, even a side product of drinking water treatment.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4609975/
Its hot enough to chemically alter things, activate diffusions, speed bacterial growth, etc.
Its not hot enough to sterilize what you're ingesting.
Coke delivery guys make sure to rotate the diet soda when they deliver it (my wife took a day-in-the-life tour when she was at coke)
This sounds bad, but it's worth keeping in mind that plain tomato juice has something like 6x methanol in it than diet sodas. The quantities involved are tiny. Aspartame is metabolized in the same way when consumed cold. The big reason soda manufacturers are concerned about heat is that it loses its sweetness.
(all that being said, it's probably still a good idea to avoid anyway)
(sadly before the era of camera phones, but the needle crystals really did look neat. The contents of the bottle were not ingested.)
A professional semi-chemist sounds much more interesting.
Its not ideal but even just keeping them in a small drink ice chest in a shaded/insulated area and keeping the van ventilated will help keep temps down.
Thoughts:
- You really need a cigarette lighter mini fridge. They're less than $100 at home depot. Note, they suck, but you don't have alternatives and you'll be able to have a cold beer occasionally.
Careful not to drain the car battery, and keep it in a shaded part of your vehicle.
- I find that there can large T differences in the car. Under the seat is fairly cool, and the T is more stable.
Keep your meds and the mini-fridge there, preferably by the floor vent if equipped.
- Does your van have windows or is it a workman's van? Glass is your enemy. You probably cant afford to just buy a van, but a white windowless Transit van is better than a Pacifica.
- Use white bed sheets to cover your interior and shade everything.
- you probably do this, but solar windshield covers.
- Keep your windows open a crack. Really just a crack small enough to keep even the rain out. Convection is huge. This is most important at day if crime is locally a problem.
- Paint it white.
- If you can, take advantage of the van's mobility and move to fairer weather throughout the year. If you have to stay in the LA region, go north just across the mesa (?) towards S. Barbara. Much cooler there. Id set myself up in Montecito myself.
Interestingly, all the Southern grannies knew this: they distrusted ice and made their tea with a pinch of baking soda, although this does change the flavor a bit.
Luckily I don't like sweet tea or other full sugar drinks (you can pry diet coke from my dead hands). Hadn't heard about the ice thing though.
My biggest triggers are fatty foods, tomato, chocolate, and palm oil.
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it also has the wholesale prices on there.
The real problem is that they get a slap on the wrist from the regulator and the business continues as usual.
Remember: GSK didn't make an unethical decision, people did. Letting those people hide behind a corporation means that workers and shareholders pay the consequences for decisions that were only made by a few people.
Pepcid (famotidine) and Tagamet (Cimetidine) are H2 blockers, another class of heartburn medication, that hasn't shown the same issues.
On the other hand, untreated chronic reflux is a big driver for stomach and esophageal cancers. So it's possible that having taken Zantac for a long time was less risky cancer-wise than not taking anything.
Putting this on GSK means that the people who knowingly sold a cancer-causing drug while hiding the risks get away without any consequences. Given this went on for 40 years, probably a lot of those people are retired, and won't even lose pay, bonuses, share price, etc.
Meanwhile, assuming this leads to any sort of lawsuits, fines, and lost sales, the people who will pay the price if GSK is held responsible will be shareholders, who likely had no visibility into these decisions, and workers who will be laid off, again without having had any role in these decisions.
This system is fundamentally broken. It's not just a small loophole that can be closed: the entire thing is a loophole that allows sociopaths to exit with the profits of wrongdoing while workers and shareholders pay the consequences. We need to stop letting bad people hide behind corporations.
Name the people responsible, and hold them responsible.
In theory shareholders have the power to prevent this sort of thing, but they don't have the visibility into the daily goings on at a company to see when things like this happen.
Likewise, the vast majority of workers had nothing to do with this decision.
In a more general sense, I do think it's healthy to let companies fail rather than subsidizing non-working business models. But as a means of disincentivizing bad behavior, it's totally ineffective.