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The pharmacist, John Marzullo, surrendered his license in February. Four patients were hospitalized in an Atlanta suburb - two in a coma - after they swallowed a compounded thyroid drug that was as much as 1,000 times the prescribed strength. In the spring, pharmacist Robert Courtney told investigators that as many as 4,200 patients may have received diluted drugs since 1992. Thirty-four cancer patients in Kansas City, Mo., were given watered-down chemotherapy drugs by a compounding pharmacist who, when he confessed, said he was trying to save money to meet pledges he had made to his church. It shattered lives, prompted one suicide and has spawned a series of lawsuits.īut it is only one of many recent incidents around the country of compounding gone awry: The contaminated drug ultimately killed three patients and hospitalized 10 others. The case of Doc's Pharmacy illustrates how doctors, as well as their patients, are unaware of the risks inherent in pharmacy compounding. And patients often have no idea that the drugs they have been prescribed are compounded. Yet there is little oversight by either federal or state regulators to ensure that drugs made by compounders are safe or effective.
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Thousands of neighborhood pharmacies across the country make hundreds of compounded products. The incident in Contra Costa County was becoming the nation's most frightening example of what can go wrong when pharmacists make their own drugs. In addition to Stahl, dozens of patients at John Muir Medical Center had been given the contaminated cortisone shots.
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It had been made at Doc's Pharmacy in Walnut Creek, where drugs were mixed from scratch in a practice known as "pharmacy compounding." The cortisone was later found to be contaminated with deadly bacteria.
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The organs were riddled with bacterial infection, and an autopsy concluded that the seemingly healthy UPS driver was killed by meningitis. Doctors at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek told Scully that her husband died from a burst blood vessel in his brain.
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