FDA: Yet Another Blood Pressure Medication Recall Due To Cancer Concerns
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2021/10/23/fda-yet-another-blood-pressure-medication-recall-due-to-cancer-concerns/
It’s like déjà vu all over again. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just announced yet another blood pressure medication recall due to unacceptably high levels of an impurity. This time it’s Lupin Pharmaceuticals Inc. that’s issued a voluntary recall. They’re recalling all batches of their irbesartan tablets as well as their irbesartan plus hydrochlorothiazide (HCTZ) tablets. The impurity of concern is N-nitrosoirbesartan, which has been deemed a “probable carcinogen” or something that may cause cancer.
If you are wondering where you may have heard this story before, just think back to 2019. That was before the Covid-19 pandemic, before people started treating toilet paper like “my precious.” Back then blood-pressure-medication-recalls-for-possible-cancer-causing-impurity announcements had seemingly become like the Halloween movie franchise. The bad sequels kept coming and coming with the same recurring plot. For example, in 2019 alone, I wrote three separate articles for Forbes on three different blood pressure medication recalls in January, March, and November of that year. In fact, in the January 2019 article, I asked, “can you recall a year with more blood pressure medication recalls than 2018?” Each time the manufacturer may have changed but the song remained the same: some type of contaminant had reached unacceptable levels.
These blood pressure medication recalls are not simply a one-time occurrence or even a two-time occurrence. As they say, once can be an accident. Two times can be a coincidence. Three times is a trend. And four times or more is a “dude, didn’t you notice that there was a trend.” Therefore, it may be time to recall all the recalls that have happened over the past several years, and determine what systems need to be changed.