On the circular which came round advising medical schools to teach the new
names, there were two I thought I might struggle with: indometacin and
sulfasalazine. Are these on the official list?
Lesley Kay
Dr Lesley Kay
Anglia Fellow in Epidemiology & Public Health/ Specialist Registrar in
Rheumatology
Cambridge & Huntingdon Health Authority
Fulbourn Hospital
Cambridge
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Sent: 17 November 1998 17:33
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Subject: strawpoll #2 (sort of)
BANs to rINNs
In 1965 the EU said all Europeans should use WHO's recommended
International
Nonproprietary Names (rINNs) for drugs. Britain preferred to stick to our
own
system of British Approved Names (BANs) and did nothing much to comply
until
quite recently when the MCA (Medicines Control Agency) apparently decided
on
our behalf that we should now do so. They issued a Discussion Paper in
Dec.1997, requiring answers by the end of January. Most people seem to find
the
whole thing a slight bore/inconvenience but accept it as inevitable for the
greater good, even if it means abandoning adrenaline for epinephrine. Has
anyone on gp-uk any strong views or comments to make?
Practical difficulties of managing the changeover have delayed the start of
implementation -- originally forecast for the end of 1998 -- but this now
seems
likely to begin in mid to late 1999.
The changes affect in practice around 100 commonly used drugs in all, an A
list
of some 20 or so where the change is considered a potential cause of
confusion,
and dual labelling is to be used for the time being, and a B list of 70 or
80
others, where the changes are mainly very minor, usually adoption of a
different spelling, e.g. e instead of oe, f instead of ph, i instead of y,
and
here the new names/spellings will become official next year at a stroke of
the
(Parliamentary) pen. (Another 150 or so changes affect drugs that have been
discontinued and are no longer generally available.)
Some of those to have dual labelling are complete changes, like
adrenaline/epinephrine, amethocaine/tetracaine, trimeprazine/alimemazine,
but
others are hardly likely to cause much confusion, e.g. procaine
penicillin/procaine benzylpenicillin, bendrofluazide/bendroflumethiazide,
frusemide/furosemide.
Then there is a C list of 30 BANs we can stick with because there were
objections to the proposed INNs and they never became rINNs, a nice
lawyerlike
workaround. It seems that such objections may delay any decision
indefinitely,
which saves us for the foreseeable future from having to talk about
deferoxamine or spell cyclosporin with an i (unlike aciclovir, which lost
its y
officially in Britain in 1995, not that many people seem to have noticed).
This
list introduces further inconsistencies, because while most sulphas will
become
sulfas, sulphafurazole will keep its ph in Britain because somebody raised
a
protest against sulfafurazole -- GOK why, after acceptance of all the other
sulfas.
All changes will presumably be adopted by the Roscoe and Black Lab spelling
checkers, and even by the voice recognition companies in due course.
Senior Lurker
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