Now it appears that the Heperin distributed by Baxter (that caused illness and deaths) came from a plant in China (What? No lead this time?) that had been "inadvertently overlooked" by the USFDA for pre-production inspection. Oops, I did it again (even more appropriate considering what's happening to Brittany)! We are asking the FDA to do more and more on no more people or facilities. Guess we reap what we sow...
My wife has compared taking drugs to Russian Roulette: first you have to worry about counterfeits in the system, then you have to worry that you actually did get the correct drug. It is getting to be like playing with more than one shell in the chamber, no?
It's not as if heperin is a new drug or anything, is it? Seems like we have to re-visit ancient Greece. Remember, "First, do no harm?" Maybe, in our rush to find a quick fix to everything, we should consider lifestyle changes first. High blood pressure? Take a pill, don't lose weight. High cholesterol? Another pill, keep eating the Whoppers. Legs hurt? Can't be lack of exercise, let's give it a name: Restless Leg Syndrome...and make a new medicine for it. Overweight? Well, now it's a recognized condition...you can call in "fat" to work and stay home (presumably to have a few more Whoppers). And the beat goes on...never take the blame for what we can name a syndrome for.
QbD and PAT can give us more consistant products. Maybe we should look hard at ourselves and ask why we need so many products. Any chemical, any drug affects the body...and not always in a good way. [Even aspirin, around for over a century, makes the stomach lining bleed.] Even water has an LD50, so what does that say about drugs? Since so many are taken merely to alleviate symptoms, we may want to work on the cause of the symptoms and stop taking so many chemicals to save ourselves the trouble of taking responsibility for our own lives.
Sorry for the run-on sentence...must be a syndrome of some kind.
