The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Friday ordered the recall of 38 stomach medications after a popular heartburn medication was reportedly found to contain trace amounts of a chemical that can cause cancer.
The FDA announced the recall at 7pm after receiving an alert a week ago from regulators in the US and Europe that trace amounts of the carcinogen n-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) was found in Zantac, a popular heartburn medication produced by British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline.
The level of NDMA was very low, so the medication was not recalled from international markets, the FDA said in a statement.
Screen grab from the Food and Drug Administration’s Web site
On receiving the alert, the administration said it launched a comprehensive inspection of all medications in Taiwan that contain ranitidine, the main ingredient in Zantac.
Twenty-one drug companies held licenses to produce 38 stomach acid drugs containing ranitidine as the main ingredient, including Culcer’s 300mg film-coated daily tablet, it said.
The FDA said that it then ordered a precautionary recall of the 38 medications.
The pharmaceutical companies must complete their recalls by tomorrow, FDA official Wu Ming-mei (吳明美) said.
They will not be allowed to market the medications until after the drugs pass a test proving that the amount of NDMA in them is within a safe range, she said.
Manufacturers failing to remove their medications from stores would face a fine of NT$60,000 to NT$300,000, according to the Consumer Protection Act (消費者保護法), Wu added.
More than 80 million tablets of stomach acid drugs containing ranitidine are prescribed to National Health Insurance patients each year, the FDA said.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
IN FULL SWING: Recall drives against lawmakers in Hualien, Taoyuan and Hsinchu have reached the second-stage threshold, the campaigners said Campaigners in a recall petition against Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Yen Kuan-heng (顏寬恒) in Taichung yesterday said their signature target is within sight, and that they need a big push to collect about 500 more signatures from locals to reach the second-stage threshold. Recall campaigns against KMT lawmakers Johnny Chiang (江啟臣), Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔) and Lo Ting-wei (羅廷瑋) are also close to the 10 percent threshold, and campaigners are mounting a final push this week. They need about 800 signatures against Chiang and about 2,000 against Yang. Campaigners seeking to recall Lo said they had reached the threshold figure over the