- Lama Khair
- BBC Arabic – London
Have you ever thought about taking an expired medicine because you can’t stand the pain, waiting for a doctor’s appointment to prescribe a new medicine for you, or you can’t afford to buy the new one?
Perhaps waiting for the doctor is not the main reason for taking these medicines in several Arab countries, but the economic conditions in countries such as Yemen, Syria and Lebanon make consulting a doctor or buying a box of a new medicine a matter beyond the power of many.
Herein lies the danger that people may resort to medication available at home without paying attention to history, or succumb to suffering without treatment.
Yemeni pharmacist Hani al-Idrisi says that there are many patients who attend his pharmacy in Sana’a who return their medicines after they see that they still have a shelf life of two months or a little more, refusing to take them on the grounds that they may not be effective. He added: “Most health organizations say that the drug does not expire in the last six months, as some believe, but often loses its focus gradually. However, this also does not apply to all drugs. Rather, it varies from one drug to another according to the cases of its use.”
Expiration date
The print expiration date goes back to 1979 when the US Food and Drug Administration formally imposed a law requiring drug companies to limit it to all prescription and nonprescription drugs. This means ensuring the safety of the drug and its full efficacy from its manufacture until its expiry date, and the expiry period of most drugs ranges between 12 and 60 months.
Taking into consideration the conditions related to the medicine box that has been opened for a long time and others such as cough medicine or eye drops that may cause harm, or the necessity of keeping the medicine in the refrigerator such as insulin for diabetic patients, for example, so that it does not lose its therapeutic property and consequently lead to dangerous results.
On its website, the World Health Organization differentiates between the phrase “expiration date” and “use before” a specific date, according to the site, if the drug’s expiration date is October, then the drug should not be consumed after October 31. If the phrase used is “use before October,” it should not be consumed after September 30th.
Getting rid of old medicines
Many countries in the world follow procedures to return expired or unused medicines to pharmacies for appropriate disposal and safe for the environment and animals.
The costs of unused medicines in Britain, for example, exceed the equivalent of 350 million US dollars annually, according to the British health care system.
According to a study by King Abdulaziz Medical City in Saudi Arabia, the cost of returning about two thousand unused medicines to pharmacies amounted to more than 26 thousand US dollars only during the month in which the study was conducted.
Dangerous or useless?
But does the drug become dangerous after its expiration date or does it just lose its usefulness?
The question may seem simple, but the answer to it is not so easy, there are pills, capsules, liquid medicines, drops and needles, and the difference in the pharmacological form must be a factor in arriving at the appropriate answer.
The Egyptian pharmacist Reham Salam says: “The types of medicines vary when their effect ends, some of them can turn into a toxic substance or others cause damage that may affect the skin, cause a chronic allergy or even kill the patient, so this issue should never be tolerated. “.
photo released, Getty Images
Pharmacovigilance notifications?
It is interesting that a number of Arab countries provide the service of “pharmacovigilance notifications” on websites such as Egypt, the Emirates, Qatar and the Maghreb, some of which enable health care providers to submit reports on any side effects resulting from any drug products or medication errors, including drug interactions Diet, as well as negative post-vaccine symptoms. Some of them are to report expired drugs or their trading centers. Others provide information, analysis, or expertise in pharmacology and toxicology from the right sources.
This is considered a great effort, but some believe that efforts to educate people not to consume expired medicines are very limited, if not non-existent. The task of the medical safety of people rests with them individually and depends on the extent of their culture and awareness of the harms and dangers.