A British pharmaceutical company had recalled more than 80 000 packs of a commonly used antidepressant after a patient discovered the wrong medicine inside their sealed packaging, reports The Independent.
The patient, who had been prescribed sertraline 100mg film-coated tablets, found a strip of citalopram 40mg film-coated tablets – another antidepressant – inside the pack.
UK-based pharmaceutical company Amarox has since initiated a “precautionary recall” of a specific batch of the sertraline, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said.
Both medications are manufactured by the same company at the same facility.
“The error appears to have occurred during secondary packaging of the blister strips into the cartons,” it said.
The regulator said that the total batch size was 81 872 packs.
In 2019, more than 16.7m prescriptions of sertraline were apparently prescribed by GPs in England.
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