I was thinking about this today after hearing a report on the radio this morning on this topic. Hospitals end up throwing away large amounts of drugs each year due to expiration, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars - although there is no real data currently.
It seems like it would be a good long term investment for a group of hospitals to partner together and begin a systematic study of the actual lifetimes of drugs. Instead of destroying all expired drugs they could send off samples to a lab for testing. They could even intentionally keep expired drugs in an off-limits area for 1, 2, 3 years past their expiration dates to gather more information. With enough hospitals participating they could gather a significant amount of data without any one hospital shouldering all of the burden. Once there is enough evidence that a particular drug is still potent the FDA could extend the allowed shelf life. This would save the hospitals money over time since they could stop paying to dispose of and replace as many expired drugs. It would also provide a general benefit to the public since people would have solid scientific evidence for the actual effective lifetime for particular drugs. This would include poison control centers, the hospitals themselves, etc. that would be able to better handle cases where someone has already taken an expired drug.
Of course an alternate way would be to require the drug companies to accept returns from hospitals of small amounts of expired drugs that they would then be responsible for testing and providing the data to the FDA. Limiting the returns to large institutions would keep the costs down (reducing push-back from the pharma companies).
It seems like it would be a good long term investment for a group of hospitals to partner together and begin a systematic study of the actual lifetimes of drugs. Instead of destroying all expired drugs they could send off samples to a lab for testing. They could even intentionally keep expired drugs in an off-limits area for 1, 2, 3 years past their expiration dates to gather more information. With enough hospitals participating they could gather a significant amount of data without any one hospital shouldering all of the burden. Once there is enough evidence that a particular drug is still potent the FDA could extend the allowed shelf life. This would save the hospitals money over time since they could stop paying to dispose of and replace as many expired drugs. It would also provide a general benefit to the public since people would have solid scientific evidence for the actual effective lifetime for particular drugs. This would include poison control centers, the hospitals themselves, etc. that would be able to better handle cases where someone has already taken an expired drug.
Of course an alternate way would be to require the drug companies to accept returns from hospitals of small amounts of expired drugs that they would then be responsible for testing and providing the data to the FDA. Limiting the returns to large institutions would keep the costs down (reducing push-back from the pharma companies).