“Nuisance suits they just settle because it’s cheaper.
Scammers go after big pockets.”
That sort of common sense won’t slow the hysteria. The usual suspects have lit the torchs and sharpened the pitchforks.
Here’s some background on this issue from 2019:
“What We Know about the Possible Carcinogen Found in Zantac
The popular heartburn drug may produce potentially unsafe levels of NDMA when its active ingredient breaks down”
A Complex Chemistry
Ranitidine has been widely used for decades. If it poses a risk to human health, how could that have gone unnoticed for so long? Light alleges that there were some limitations in early safety studies involving Zantac in the 1980s. Glaxo—a company that eventually merged into GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)—Zantac’s original manufacturer, published a study of ranitidine’s metabolites in urine in 1981, but Light says that study appears not to have looked for NDMA. Glaxo published another study in 1987 that tested the stomach contents of people taking ranitidine, concluding that there was “no significant increase” in the concentration of nitrosamines, a group of chemicals—many of them carcinogenic—that includes NDMA. But Light says the detection method used in that paper was designed for food products and does not directly measure nitrosamines. In addition, the study discarded all stomach samples that contained ranitidine because they could have “falsely high” concentrations of nitrosamines, so any NDMA produced by the breakdown of ranitidine would not have been detected.
In a statement to Scientific American, GSK says it had considered the potential formation of nitrosamines in the body—during ranitidine’s development, during its regulatory review and in subsequent studies. Scientists had hypothesized that any drugs that raised the stomach’s pH could increase the growth of bacteria that produce nitrites, which could interact with chemicals called amines to produce nitrosamines. Although several studies did find that taking ranitidine could increase the concentration of nitrites in the stomach—and at least one found a statistically significant increase in nitrosamines—that does not mean they cause cancer, GSK says. The company adds that ranitidine was not carcinogenic in studies of rodents whose diet and bacterial metabolism were similar to those of humans and claims that “extensive pharmacovigilance monitoring, regular safety reviews and substantive epidemiological studies have not linked ranitidine to raised cancer risks.”
