I love the shady reporting on this:
“Johnson & Johnson recalled some Tylenol Arthritis Caplets in November and December due to the smell, which caused nausea, stomach pain, vomiting and diarrhea.”
An odor would *not* cause pain and diarrhea, the chemical which caused the odor could. They haven’t even reported what the chemical is!
The problems were linked to the presence of a chemical called 2,4,6-tribromoanisole (TBA), which results from the breakdown of a chemical in wood pallets used to transport and store packaging materials for the drugs.
It's a breakdown product of 2,4,6-trichloroanisaole (TCA), a wood preservative.
It has an unusual moldy, musty, or mildew-like odor. A whine con-uh-sewer might say it's corked...
The earlier report, which was posted here on FR, said that the cause of the smell was mold. They left the packages that they packed the products in setting on wet pallets, this caused mold to grow on the packages which in turn showed up later on(I presume on because I don’t see how mold go inside the packages)the bottles of medication. This caused the symptoms which were described as mild(by the FDA)and non life threatening. Whether they were telling the truth of not is anyone’s guess. For what it’s worth I have a package of Tylenol Arthritis tablets that has one of the lot numbers on it, I had taken about half of it before the recall came out. It does not smell and did not make me sick. None the less, I quit taking them. I would guess from this that not all of the products were affected by this “mold”.