While products of all kinds are recalled throughout the country on an all-too-regular basis, one group of products that consumers might not think about as being dangerous or defective products are prescription drugs. To be sure, people who are prescribed drugs by their doctors often take for granted that the products will help their condition, whatever it is–and that the drugs will not be inert, or even worse, do them harm.

Women in Pennsylvania who are prescribed birth control pills may want to take a close look at what they are taking after Pfizer Inc. announced a recall of more than one million packs of the pills. While the pills are not dangerous in the sense that they are not harmful, taking them as they are packaged might provide an improper dosage amount and could lead to unintended pregnancies.

The specific products that were taken off the shelves were Pfizer's Lo/Ovral-28 birth control pills, as well as the generic version, known as Norgestrel. The pills are in blister packs with 28 pills, one for every day of a monthly cycle. The first 21 tablets have the active drug, and then women are supposed to take the remaining seven placebo tablets each day until beginning a new pack.

However, Pfizer said that some of the packs were incorrectly packaged: some had pills missing, and some had extra active pills where the placebos should be. An alert consumer noticed that she had a pack with a pink placebo tablet in a place where a white active tablet should have been, and the company determined it had issues in its production of the pills that led to several packets of the pills being issued with errors.

While the company says the actual error rate for the pills is very small, and that alert women would probably realize if they were taking the wrong pill on a given day, accidents can happen. Women in Pennsylvania who think they might have been negatively affected by this product labeling error can contact an experienced attorney to determine if they would benefit from taking legal action against the company.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, "Pfizer Cites Packaging Flaws in Birth-Control Pill Recall," Jonathan D. Rockoff and Jennifer Corbett Dooren, Feb. 2, 2012