Posted on 04/23/2009 9:33:09 AM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) - A Florida pharmacy has told The Associated Press it incorrectly prepared a medication for 21 polo horses that died over the weekend while preparing to play in a championship match.
Jennifer Beckett of Franck's Pharmacy in Ocala, Fla., told the AP in a statement the business conducted in internal investigation that found "the strength of an ingredient in the medication was incorrect.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
Oh man is that ever going to cost them some serious green.
Crack dealers take note, this may be your next big seller.
Better call in Obama. This is big stuff.
Will probably be enough money from this screw up to float Venezuala for an entire day.
I hope they have a MASSIVE insurance policy.
Cha-ching. Would suck to be their inssurance company now.
Each one of those horses was $100,000 minimum per head.
Oopsie!....my bad!
I’m not too good with the metric system either. Dang decimal points....
Idiots.
That is was oopsie? Oh, yeah....
Maybe a mcg/mg mistake. Microgram vs. Milligram. That is a 1,000 dosage difference if that happened.
Speaking of pharmacy mistakes. About 15 years ago, RiteAid was giving my wife a birth control prescription for someone else when she was supposed to be getting a pre-natal vitamin subscription filled. Could have proved fatal to the unborn. To the state of CT that followed up, no big deal, nothing was done.
Needless to say we never went into any riteaid again.
How sad. I think I saw that the horses were insured, though not for all that much. So I guess the owner will be compensated. Still, must be awful for those who worked with them and took care of them.
If the “goof” caused the death of the animals I’m sure the pharmacy will be paying dearly. Wonder if it was part of a pattern of carelessness, or unfamiliarity with the doses used for veterinary purposes.
All the horses were on the Lechuza Polo team. Caracas, Venezuela.
Probably insured by AIG. ;>)
I ended up getting "sorry" calls all the way from Bentonville, Arkansas on that one.
That’s it. I am never going back to that pharmacy.
They botched the level of medication enough to KILL not one horse, but 21 horses? This isn’t a random goof, this was a goof of alarming proportions.
Even if they were mixing this medication in one huge bucket, the level went from benefitial, to harmful, to lethal. How, other than complete incompetence and recklessness does one muster a mistake of this magnitude?
I grew up on a farm, we administered medicine to animals on a routine basis. Ask any farmer, the routine is far more common and expensive than they would like.
You buy 100cc quantity of a medicine. You know that this $$$ medicine will provide 20 doses (at 5 cc per dose). If you take enough for 10 doses, and you use more than half the bottle - something is wrong. You can SEE that the bottle is less than half full, so either you didn’t inventory your product (incompetence) or you are not keeping track of how you are using this (recklessness).
If a farmer does this, wouldn’t you expect a Pharmacy, ran by people with degrees in counting pills be able to manage this?
I own Quarter Horses......you would be amazed at how much these horses will be worth.....especially since they died at someone elses hand. If they were worth $10,000 apiece before they died, now they could be worth $100,000 apiece
oops
Venezuela should know that it’s not healthy to criticize Obama. Maybe they’ll think twice next time.
“Cargill and the other companies that you “nationalized” cost us $XXX,XXX,XXX.00”
“Let's just deduct this cost from what you owe America”
GOOFED!?!?!?!?
The report I heard was a total loss of $2.5-3.5MM. What a shame for all involved.
or $25,000 per quarter
I had a service company that serviced Albertsons Grocery Stores.
A pharmacy at one of the stores I dealt with gave an old lady the wrong script and it killed her.
Family settled out of court for a couple million.
Just wait till 17 year old girls start buying Plan B over the counter,
with no knowledge of their medical history required, and taking it like
candy!
I realize horses require larger doses than people but it’s hard to imagine overdosing a horse without realizing they were dispensing a whole lot of meds. I wonder what they all needed medicated for.
The script should have a print out with a number and description of the pill. I try to check it.
That is one dead pharmacy walking.
From what I understand it wasn’t the amount. It was the wrong mixture. Not sure what they were being medicated for. Could have something to do with the different type of feed here in the States. Horses don’t like their diets changed.
Franck’s Pharmacy is probably grateful this wasn’t people that died from their mistake.
“Just wait till 17 year old girls start buying Plan B ...”
Oh, I won’t know about that, that’s part of the law you know. What I don’t know can’t hurt me -—libs
/sarcasm
Franck’s insurance company is probably more grateful.
How do you spell LAW SUIT?!
from Fla Sun-Sentinel:
Lechuza also issued a statement to AP acknowledging that a Florida veterinarian wrote the prescription for the pharmacy to create a compound similar to Biodyl, a French-made supplement that includes vitamins and minerals and is not approved for use in the United States.
“Only horses treated with the compound became sick and died within 3 hours of treatment,” Lechuza said in the statement. “Other horses that were not treated remain healthy and normal.”
Lechuza also said it was cooperating with authorities that include the State Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.
From Yahoo news:
FDA spokeswoman Siobhan DeLancey said compounding pharmacies are legal, but they are not allowed by law to recreate existing drugs or supplements under patent or to recreate any drugs not approved for use in the U.S., such as Biodyl.
The FDA refused to approve Biodyl for use in the U.S. in October 2008, saying it appeared “to be a new animal drug which is unsafe.”
A pharmacy could face criminal charges if it made the supplement, DeLancey said.
The law does not, however, prohibit veterinarians from purchasing and administering each supplement separately.
CindyDawg
Your story is great.
Was an error by pharmacist himself.
Yes and that is what should have happened.
He said he’d been working too many hours and was tired.
He soon after retired.
As I mentioned on another thread, I think there might have been a problem with the sodium selenite (which is not a good form of selenium for man or beast).
I ended up getting "sorry" calls all the way from Bentonville, Arkansas on that one.
Costco tripled the proper dose of a prescription I was taking. I started feeling very ill over a period of a couple of weeks. Finally I knew something must be wrong and looked up the proper dose myself on the Internet.
I suppose I could have made a much bigger deal out of it but all I ended up asking for was a few months of free medicine which was not expensive anyway. They blamed it on the doctor's handwriting. I noticed the pharmacist's hands were shaking as she spoke with me.
Why would all 21 need the same drug anyway?
As I said, it could have something to do with the type of feed here compared to the feed in their country. It could have been a supplement.
I waas pretty startled when I first saw that headline earlier today. It was quickly revised by AP to something more respectable, but not before the “Goofed” version had fanned out across cyberspace. I suspect the headline writer has been demoted to some safer position, like punctuation checker.
I don’t think I believe this. I think the horses were poisoned.
It’s a routine supplement — B12, selenium, potassium, and magnesium — all stuff that any 10 year old can buy off the supplement shelf at any drugstore. Math matters. Most substances can kill in large enough quantities, even water. I suspect the selenium in this case, because potassium toxicity is so well-known (plenty of human deaths from potassium overdoses in hospitals) and the amount of potassium it would take to kill a horse would be massive. And potassium would probably have killed faster if it was going to at all — it’s commonly used for deliberate lethal injections.
I bumped into a story about a 75 year old Australian man who read on the internet that selenium might prevent prostate cancer, purchase bulk sodium selenite powder (the form of selenium in the brand-name product that was supposedly copied for these horses), took 100,000 times the safe dose (he took 10 grams), and died 6 hours later despite intensive medical treatment. That sounds like about the same time frame as these horses, who had reportedly been given the supplement earlier the same day.
Grams, instead of milligrams in this case (microgram doses of selenium are for humans).
Each 100 ml of Biodyl contains:
Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12)..........0.05 g
Sodium selenite................................. 100 mg
Potassium aspartate semihydrate ..... 1.000 g
Magnesium aspartate tetrahydrate..... 1.500 g
Excipient q.s. .................................. 100 ml
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