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 ...
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
Have you noticed these pharmacies now employ a pharmacist and several pharmacist ‘technicians’.
The techs fill the orders and the pharmacist signs off on them.
I’m curious as to the schooling required to be a ‘technician’. I suspect not much.
This is a tragedy for all involved.
I go through Ocala quite often. Nearly impossible for me to flee Florida without going that way.
Wonderful horse country. I stay once in a while at the Hilton in Ocala and they have a horse barn and exercise area in back you can keep your horse over night at little extra cost the area is such a horse area.
Ocala is right behind Lexington in the horse trade.
The area or Wellington is a ritzy polo and golf area but lots of horse money abounds. A real tragedy all around.
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