Emergency Recall On 16,000+ Baby Aspirin Bottles
A CVS pharmacist discovered acetaminophen pills in a 120-pill bottle of baby aspirin, sparking an immediate nationwide aspirin recalls.
More than 16,000 bottles of the pills are being voluntary recalled by Advance Pharmaceutical, Inc. They’re supposed to be filled with 81-mg aspirin pills. However, one bottle in the recalled lot had 500-mg acetaminophen pills. To date, no injuries have been reported.
Dr. Joe Odin, a Mount Sinai Hospital in New York associate professor, said some people could go into liver failure.
Odin said the number one method for suicide in the U.K. is acetaminophen overdose. He said many folks who accidentally overdose on the medication do it because acetaminophen is also in many prescriptions they are taking.
Dr. Corey Slovis, who is in charge of the emergent medicine department at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said the overdose is common and that his department hates these types of overdoses due to their silent nature.
Slovis said patients overdosing on acetaminophen don’t feel sick immediately unless the dose is so massive that it causes them to vomit within six hours. Many acetaminophen overdose patients usually don’t see a doctor for 48 hours afterwards and only come in when they notice the first signs of liver failure – usually jaundice.
Slovis said it’s this type of overdose that leads to liver failure, requiring the patient to need a liver transplant or die. If the overdose is caught early enough, patients can have their stomachs pumped with charcoal to breakdown the acetaminophen. Intravenous medications may also help to reverse the damage.
Dr. Sripal Bangalore, an NYU Langore Medical Center cardiologist, said the majority of people who use baby aspirin are doing it to keep the blood platelets from fusing together, and because of that baby aspirin is necessary for patients who’ve had stent surgery.
He said Tylenol and Aspirin are two different things. Tylenol, Bangalore said, does not have the anti-clotting properties that are found in aspirin.
He said if patients mistakenly take Tylenol rather than aspirin, they could go into stent thrombosis – stent blockage – and the patients could die.
Bangalore said the matter should be taken seriously because it is so dangerous to a patient’s health and well-being… basically, his or her life.
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