Well said, Paul. There have been several major articles about this
topic, and everything you say corresponds with my reading. NB that
one needn't be suicidal to get too much acetaminophen -- Esquire
magazine cited severe liver damage in people taking a normal dose, but
in conjunction with alcohol consumption. Totally destroyed livers.
The FDA lets this pass, which is proof to me that this bureaucracy is
almost hopelessly corrupted. Any decent consumer-protection agency
would take rapid action to eliminate this danger posed by a widely-used
OTC drug.
JBB
On Monday, Dec 6, 2004, at 09:22 Asia/Tokyo, Paul Holloway wrote:
That's very true - acetaminophen, what we call paracetamol in the UK
is a good example. More than 15 grams, or 30 tablets, will damage most
people's livers. Many people feel suicidal, take a handful of tablets,
usually with a lot of booze and go to sleep. They wake up, feeling
more cheerful, collapse with liver failure a few days later and die
slowly and horribly of internal bleeding over the next week or two,
unless they are lucky enough (?!) to get a liver transplant. The
antidotes (either n-acetyl cysteine or methionine, which will be
familiar to many of you) are effective, but only within 24 hours of
the od.
The sickening thing is that this is preventable. If the pharmaceutical
companies put methionine in with the acetaminophen/paracetamol then
overdoses would be relatively harmless. But the drug would cost more,
and it would smell sulfurous, so people might not buy it, and profits
would suffer. So they let people die horribly instead.
So many people seem to think that if you overdose on anything you will
just go to sleep and never wake up, but this is rarely true. Aspirin
is almost as nasty as acetaminophen - an overdose screws up your
body's acid-base and electrolyte balance and rips out the lining of
your stomach. If you survive the alternating acidosis and alkalosis,
you will likely bleed to death from the holes in your stomach.
Please spread this around. More people need to know this. I work in
clinical biochemistry, and have spent over 20 years measuring blood
levels of these things for emergency rooms.
And people worry about a remote risk of turning slightly blue!
Paul H
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