Comment by ballenf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ballenf | Hacker News Reader

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The article states with absolute certainty that no patient has ever been harmed by an expired drug. Not doubting your point about tetracycline, but how much would a patient need to ingest to be harmed? Then there's the argument that the reason no one's been harmed is because the policy is working.

Harm due to unavailability of drugs or higher costs are much harder to track, of course.

Yet another case of a balance being hard to reach due to the visibility of costs on one side versus the difficulty of measuring on the other. So easy for the general public to see the cost of strictly enforcing overly conservative expiration dates as close to zero.

/offtopic: these issues are the achilles heals of democracies. Not that there's a better system.

See this comment for some contrary opinions on harm with citations in the literature:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14797616

Personally, I take all quotations like the ones in the article with a huge grain of salt. There's often enough of a communication barrier that even good reporters can misunderstand an answer, or for the researcher to be answering a different question than the reporter asks. And there's also the possibility that the researcher just had a failure of memory.

I thought antibiotics lose their efficacy part there due date

Some even become toxic, like tetracyclines!

I have to think they must, considering they need to be refrigerated. (Or at least the ones I've used did)

Other drugs lose efficacy at different times too, of course. But most still won't do you any harm (except for not helping the issue you're seeking to remedy), which was the OP's point, right? Or am I misunderstanding things.

> except for not helping the issue you're seeking to remedy

... which is harm. If you've applied appropriate medication to deal with the issue, but that medication has gone bad, then you're in a position where you think you've applied a remedy but haven't.

Even if you later find out that the medication was bad, you have no idea how much effectiveness there was left, which affects future dosage calculations.

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