Tylenol, Tylenol Plus, Motrin, Zyrtec and Benadry: Children's Versions Recall - Product Recall Information

You've probably heard this already: McNeil Consumer Healthcare recalled these products:

• Children's TYLENOL® and
  Infants' TYLENOL®
• Children's MOTRIN® and
  Infants' MOTRIN®
• Children's ZYRTEC®
• Children’s BENADRYL®

Good news: it looks like nobody's been hurt.

Bad news: some batches of these over-the-counter medications didn't meet quality standards.

McNeil Consumer Healthcare has a website set up, with more information: including a detailed product with NDC number for each version of each recalled product. That's an ID number that tells what lot that bottle's medication came from.

There's a little more information in this article:

• "Children's Cold, Allergy Medicine Recalled"
  FOXNews (May 1, 2010 )

Over-the-Counter Medication Recall, My Take

This isn't good news - but it is, in a way. Sort of.

Defective over-the-counter medications - for children, yet - getting into the supply chain is not good news. It's bad news. The products had issues with:

• Higher concentration of active ingredient than is specified on the bottle
• "Tiny particles"
• Inactive ingredients that don't meet internal testing requirements
  (McNeil Consumer Healthcare press release)

Not good. Bad.

That said, this recall is good news - in a way. The company that produces those medications, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, recalled them - before anybody got hurt, apparently. Smart move, in the long run.

There are other ways of dealing with defective products, though. Remember the case of the poison peanuts? ("Peanut Peril: Remembering" (February 26, 2009))

I don't mind people feeling good about the country they're born in - even if it is America - and I don't have a problem with those "made in the USA" stickers on products. On the whole, I think it's good for people to draw a degree of satisfaction with making adequate products.

On the other hand, I don't think that 'made in America' is a foolproof guarantee of quality. Think about the problem that Toyota has with its vehicles that were made in America (and other countries, too).¹

These defective children's cold remedies have gone global. Many went to the United States, some were shipped to:

• Canada
• Dominican Republic
• Dubai (UAE)
• Fiji
• Guam
• Kuwait
• Guatemala
• Jamaica
• Panama
• Puerto Rico
• Trinidad and Tobago

Which is one reason that I'm writing this. My guess is that each of those countries has its own methods for getting the word out to folks, about product recalls. But, I'm also guessing that a fair number of people in each country have Web connections. (The Dominican Republic, for example, has 280,457 Internet hosts, Fiji has 12,747. (This ain't the 20th century, folks.)

So I figure that if folks in a community didn't learn about this recall through their local or regional setup: maybe someone living there visits this blog now and again.

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¹ My latest post on that SNAFU is "United States Transportation Department Lies About Canada - or - Toyota Fouled Up. Again" (April 7, 2010)). More has happened since then: but it looks like 'detail' - interesting to the people involved, but maybe not such a big deal to others.