How to Find Information on Tylenol and Other Recalls

News that there has been another Tylenol recall is worrisome. I only clean out my medicine cabinet once or twice a year. What if drugs in my medicine cabinet were recalled and I never heard about them? I find the Tylenol recall especially disconcerting because there are many Tylenol products that I give my children, and I see that some of them were recalled. The current Tylenol recall is due to a moldy smell that has been making people sick, so it is not life threatening, but what if it were?

The regulation of drug recalls falls to the Food and drug Administration. It took me several minutes of looking at their website, to find the drug recall area. If you want to look at drug recalls, go to www.fda.gov and then click on "R" for recalls. This will bring up the site index for that letter. Under recalls, you can see that there are two entries. One is "Recalls (Biologics)" and the other is "Recalls, Market Withdrawals, and Safety Alerts." Prescription drug recall information can be found under "Recalls (Biologics)." This is where you can find out about recalls of prescription drugs regulated by the FDA, or those products that are prescribed by your doctor.

Tylenol however, is not a prescription drug, and I was surprised that there was no link to information on the Tylenol recall on this webpage. I had to keep looking to find information on the Tylenol recall. If you want to read the Tylenol Recall press release, let me save you the trouble of digging it up. The Tylenol recall press release is posted at http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/ucm197746 . It is titled "McNeil Consumer Healthcare Announces Voluntary Recall of Certain Over-the Counter (OTC) Products in the Americas, UAE, and Fiji." It is very disturbing that the word Tylenol is only used once in the press release, and it is in regards to a prior Tylenol recall. It isn't in the title. To find out what Tylenol products are in the current recall, you have to open a PDF document that contains 14 pages of Tylenol products. There are many Children's Tylenol and Children's Motrin products listed in the recall.

For future reference, it is easier to search for MedWatch for OTC recalls than it is to search for the FDA. Medwatch is FDA's safety monitoring and reporting branch. Their website is http://www.fda.gov/safety/MedWatch. If you are concerned about future product recalls, you can sign up for email alerts on future drug recalls by clicking on the link called "Join the MedWatch e-list." Or, bookmark the page for future reference.

Sources:
www.fda.gov

www.fda.gov/safety/medwatch