Question of the Day 3, September 23, 2013 Why didn't the State of Texas Act in light of this statement in 2010-11--“Any problem with these products could have dramatic and potentially life-threatening effects on the patient.” Why Should the American Public or U.S. Congress Trust them to Protect the public health and safety now if it knew this then and did nothing? And where are the test results from all these years of random testing?

In 2008, the Texas State Board of Pharmacy warned that there needed to be more testing of compounded drugs — prescription medications mixed and prepared by individual pharmacies, typically with much less oversight than government regulators demand of drug manufacturers.


A year earlier Texas legislators had for the first time given the agency $50,000 a year to pay for random testing, which it had begun. But “we believe that the agency should be conducting more tests,” the board’s administrators wrote in the request for their 2010-2011 budget. “Any problem with these products could have dramatic and potentially life-threatening effects on the patient.”


Instead, thanks to budget cuts, over the past three years the number of pharmacies whose products the state tests for contamination, sterility and potency to ensure patient safety has plummeted.


In 2010, the agency conducted tests on medications compounded at 65 Texas pharmacies. The following year, the number dropped to 30. By the end of fiscal year 2012, in August, the number had plunged to only 21 — less than a third from only two years earlier.


Money the agency spent on the testing program slid 72 percent over that time.

quoted from here