The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday urged people who have purchased AstraZeneca’s film-coated rosuvastatin tablets — an oral lipid-lowering drug branded as Crestor — to take them back to the pharmacy or hospital where they bought them for replacement before Saturday.
After more than one batch of Crestor was found to contain counterfeit drugs earlier this month, AstraZeneca on Tuesday last week agreed to the FDA’s suggestion to recall all batches on the market while the investigation continues.
Since stopping the medication is not recommended, AstraZeneca has agreed to replace the recalled tablets with certified Crestor drugs for about 570,000 National Health Insurance patients who take it, starting from Thursday last week.
The FDA said that 70,600 boxes of replacement drugs stamped with “exchange” were due to arrive at 1,693 hospitals, clinics and pharmacies yesterday.
It recommended that people call their healthcare facility or pharmacy — listed on AstraZeneca Taiwan’s official Web site — in advance to make sure if the new drugs are available for exchange, adding that expired drugs would not be accepted for replacement.
The FDA also urged people to call AstraZeneca’s hotline (0809-081-133) or the agency’s consultation hotline (0227-878-200) for inquiries.
In addition, the FDA said local health bureaus conducted random inspections on three types of drugs — Livalo, Vytorin and Januvia tablets — which were reported by local media as also having been mixed with counterfeit drugs.
Results showed that the contents of all 118 inspected items matched the original drugs’ specifications, the FDA said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching