Proper disposal of leftover medication can help reduce antibiotic resistance

Proper disposal of leftover medication, particularly antibiotics and opioids, can help reduce antibiotic resistance, prevent children from being poisoned and stop the misuse of addiction-forming drugs.

But a telephone survey conducted by researchers at UC San Francisco found that fewer than half of California pharmacies provided disposal instructions meeting U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines, and just 10 percent followed the FDA's preferred recommendation to take back unused medications from their customers.Over a two-month period in early 2018 researchers posing as parents of children who had recently had surgery spoke to employees at nearly 900 pharmacies in California and asked them what to do with two leftover medications: the antibiotic Bactrim (sulfamethoxazole-trimethoprim), and liquid Hycet (hydrocodone-acetaminophen), a pain reliever containing an opioid compound.

Neither medication should be left in the medicine cabinet, since the antibiotics could be taken improperly for subsequent infections they cannot cure, contributing to antibiotic resistance, and opioids can fall into the wrong hands. In the absence of a takeback program, the FDA says antibiotics should be mixed with an unpalatable substance, such as coffee grounds or kitty litter, and disposed of in a sealed container in the trash to keep them from getting into the water supply or inadvertently ingested.

The FDA recommends that opioids be flushed down a toilet, since people may otherwise find and accidentally ingest or intentionally abuse them, even when they've been mixed with an unpalatable substance and thrown into the trash. Overall, just 47 percent of pharmacies gave the correct instructions on how to dispose of antibiotics, and only 34 percent gave correct instructions for opioids.

Source: University of California - San Francisco