Urgent recall issued for Alysena-28 birth control pills
Posted April 8, 2013 2:28 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – There is a fear some women could be facing unwanted pregnancies thanks to a faulty batch of birth control pills.
Drug distributor Apotex has issued an urgent recall for their 28 day pill packs of Alysena-28.
As many as 50,000 women across the country wide could be affected. A Health Canada recall notice stated that some packages of the contraceptive could have had two weeks worth of sugar pill put in instead of one.
Apotex contacted places that sold the pills, but not the women who were prescribed them.
London Drugs Vice-President John Tse is extremely critical of how this has been handled.
He says his stores have come up with a crisis plan and have been contacting around 350 women offering everything from advice and free pregnancy tests to the morning-after pill. “We set up a call centre to answer specific questions.”
Tse says he has also had words with the manufacturer over the weekend stating his displeasure with the situation.
“Given the extreme sensitive nature of the product, we customized a letter and reached out to physicians to find out why they prescribed it. There may be very young women on this medication [to control things like acne] so we didn’t want to call inappropriately either,” says Tse.
The lot or serial number affected: LF01899A
