Extreme temperatures may pose risks to mail-order meds
Take a look at your prescription bottles. Most say “Store at room temperature” or “Keep refrigerated.”
But what happens when drugs are delivered by mail? Were those instructions followed as the medicine wended its way from the pharmacy to your doorstep?
Those questions haunt Loretta Boesing, who lives in Park Hills, a small town in the hills of eastern Missouri, where the weather varies dramatically from season to season.
“It’s crazy,” Boesing said. “We sometimes experience temperatures like they would feel in Arizona. Sometimes we experience temperatures like they would feel up North.”
In 2012, when son Wesley was 2 years old, he got so sick from the flu that he needed a liver transplant.
The transplant surgery went well, but just a few months later, lab tests showed Wesley’s body appeared to be rejecting the organ.
Boesing felt both devastated and guilty.
“I feel the extra duty of not just protecting his life, but the life that lives on inside him,” she said.
Wesley didn’t lose his new liver, but during his weeks in the hospital, Boesing’s mind raced, thinking about what might have gone wrong.
She remembered that when his anti-rejection medications were last delivered to their house, the box had been left outside by the garage, where it sat for hours.
Temperatures that day were over 100 degrees, well beyond the safe temperature range listed on the drug’s guidelines.
At the time, she hadn’t worried about it.
“Even though I see plainly on the bottle that it says, ‘Store at room temperature,’” Boesing said, “I still thought, ‘Ah, someone’s making sure it’s safe.’”
But after Wesley’s setback, Boesing swore off mail-order pharmacies altogether, and this year she started a Facebook group for patients who share her concerns about how extreme temperatures during shipping could affect the prescription drugs that many people receive by mail.
As of 2016, prescriptions fulfilled by mail accounted for nearly a quarter of total U.S. spending on prescriptions (before rebates and discounts), according to a report from IQVIA’S Institute for Human Data Science.