
The FDA Announces Two More Antacid Recalls Due to Cancer Risk - elliekelly
https://www.wired.com/story/the-fda-announces-two-more-antacid-recalls-due-to-cancer-risk/
======
higginsc
This whole thing seems overblown. The conditions required to induce NDMA
accumulation are so far outside the normal bounds as to be farcical. Every
drug I’ve ever seen advises you to keep it in a controlled temperature
environment.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
I can see people keeping some Zantac in their car and that gets quite hot
(140+) in the summer.

I don’t think the penalty for not storing your medicine quite right should be
ingesting a carcinogen.

~~~
Tagbert
It was 130C / 260F that is considerably higher than the inside of a car.

Still, this suggests that ranitidine may not be stable and its breakdown
products may be risky. If mixing it with nitrite produces NDMA under condition
found in the stomach that is another risk case. I wonder if there is any
breakdown over time just sitting on the shelf?

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Oh I didn’t notice that. Then I agree this is silly. No you should not heat
your Zantac to 266 F haha.

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DataWorker
If you add nitrite to ranitidine and heat it to 140 the levels of NDMA
produced become carcinogenic. The person who made the discovery has a business
built around consumer fear about contaminated pharmaceuticals.

~~~
victor9000
> Valisure also conducted tests with simulated gastric fluid (at body
> temperature, 37 degrees Celsius) and added sodium nitrite, simulating a diet
> with high levels of the common preservative found in processed meats, and
> found high levels of NDMA

~~~
endothrowho333
See page 7: [https://www.valisure.com/wp-content/uploads/Valisure-
Ranitid...](https://www.valisure.com/wp-content/uploads/Valisure-Ranitidine-
FDA-Citizen-Petition-v4.12.pdf)

They did _NOT_ simulate a normal diet with common levels of sodium nitrate. At
10 mM there is no NDMA found. Sodium nitrate concentrations for meat are much
lower than 10 mM. The FDA puts a strict upper limit of sodium nitrate
concentrations in meat at 100mg/kg, so around a concentration of .015mM (!)

I don't need to do any further math to tell you no one is eating that much
cured meat in a single sitting (it's simply not possible).

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bonkbart
Traveling in South Korea and went to pharmacy to get rantidine but it was told
it was no longer available bc, thought I heard "it is now used for cancer"
which seemed weird but guess it was language issue and it was "it can cause
cancer".

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0x8BADF00D
IANAD, but antacids are the wrong approach to solving digestive dysfunction.
IME, pancreatin and ox bile have eliminated the vast majority of my digestive
issues.

It’s debatable how effective antacids are anyway; for example, if you have an
H. Pylori infection, antibiotics would be way more effective.

~~~
gumby
I think physicians already understand the difference between H. Pylori-induced
reflux and general GERD and have some experience on which treatments to
recommend.

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mirimir
Wired has started doing something strange.

This URL doesn't load in my version of Firefox (old and heavily tweaked, I
admit). And it crashes Midori.

But this works fine:

$ w3m -dump [https://www.wired.com/story/the-fda-announces-two-more-
antac...](https://www.wired.com/story/the-fda-announces-two-more-antacid-
recalls-due-to-cancer-risk/)

Edit: OK, it works in my Firefox if I hit escape as soon as the page has
loaded. So maybe there's some non-content module that loads more slowly, and
triggers the problem. It could be a "turn off ad blocker" popup. Given that I
block popups.

~~~
dangus
I’m constantly amazed by comments like this one posted by highly technical
people who manage to become unable to view a simple website by making the
endeavor vastly over-complicated.

Meanwhile, Grandma can read the article just fine when she double clicks on
the blue e.

~~~
seandougall
I'd like to find out more about what kind of setup Grandma has, in that case.
I'm sitting here on an unmodified Safari installation, and the top of the
window is obscured by a giant floating banner ad, while the bottom is obscured
by a "subscribe" banner, which is _itself_ obscured by an oversized cookie
notice. All of which leaves less than 80px of height to read the actual
article content. Given the nice large font size, that means I can see three
lines of text at any given moment. I didn't have the same issue that GP did,
but it's definitely true that Wired has been adopting some awful web
development practices for a while now.

(Side note: My kids' grandma is a retired software developer. So I guess maybe
it's just that the average grandma is more sophisticated than we are?)

~~~
mirimir
Huh. So maybe my problem _is_ some mix of blocking ads and popups.

~~~
krawakoliz
I’ve noticed certain sites, like government websites (my local healthcare.gov
site), banking sites, insurance sites, only work if you disable tracking
protection entirely in safari/firefox, and one of them (I think the healthcare
site) only worked in chrome with no ad blocker.

Folks, this is not a good sign.

~~~
mirimir
Yeah, it's an arms race.

