doodadblog.com

When it comes to best before dates, I’ve never followed the letter of the law. I’ve always tended to see them more as serving suggestions than rules. The way I see it, it’s best before, but still relatively reasonable after. Is the cream in this cup of coffee the best I’ve every had? Maybe not. But if it smooths out the flavour of my coffee and it doesn’t curdle, I figure I’ve come out ahead.

Sometimes I even use the sniff test. The sight of this always triggers my wife’s gag reflex and her immediate demand to toss whatever I’ve been smelling, however it smells. And it’s not like I don’t have standards — or more accurately, double standards. If it’s in question, I don’t feed it to rest of the family. But I’ve always seen my own stomach as a bit of a test kitchen.

It’s different when it come to medicine. It was probably time to check our medicine cabinets for expiry dates anyway, but the recent news of a voluntary recall by McNeil — the creators of Children’s Tylenol and MOTRIN — has moved spring cleaning the medicine cabinet to the top of the to-do list.

The products in question include all lots of Children’s MOTRIN and Infants’ MOTRIN liquid suspension products and Children’s TYLENOL Cough and Runny Nose liquid suspension. According to the recall, no other Canadian products are impacted (I’m not sure if additional products are being recalled in the US). The company advises consumers to discontinue use of these products because they don’t meet manufacturing specs. In fact, they’re not sure how much active medicine is in each bottle.

I didn’t have to look far. We had two bottles of the MOTRIN and one of the TYLENOL. That’s because up until now I guess we considered them the most trusted brands — they’re the most used products in our children’s medicine cabinet. We’ve used about two thirds of it all, each dose of which we carefully measured out when our children were at their most vulnerable. If only they were measuring as carefully at the plant. So, I’m disappointed in McNeil and in the MOTRIN and TYLENOL brands that represent them. Now we have trust issues. And despite TYLENOL’s Google ad that’s probably appearing in your margin at this very instant, I’ll be looking forsomeone else to trust during the next cold season. (McNeil, if you’re reading this, you can email me directly to let me know where you’ll be sending your refund cheque along with your personal apology to my kids).

And my top priority for the day, after I finish my coffee with one sour cream and two sugars, is to check for passed due dates in our medicine cabinet. Anyone know the proper way to dispose of old medicines?

Read the official recall release from McNeil Products here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Urgent – U.S. voluntary over-the-counter medicines recall impacts selected products in Canada (newswire.ca)
• Children’s Tylenol and Other Drugs Recalled (nytimes.com)
• How to Get Your Tylenol Refund (bucks.blogs.nytimes.com)
• More Tylenol, Motrin recalls: Glad I use generics (timesunion.com)
• All About the 2010 Recall on Children’s Medicine (businesspundit.com)