Pushing Panacryl and Vicryl Sutures: Is Fluffy next?

Mokena, ILAre you looking for cheap surgical supplies, such as Ethicon's Panacryl or Vicryl sutures? Don't care if they're a bit "doggy"? Well, discounted and aging supplies are remarkably easy to find.

Just google eSutures.com. It describes itself as a discount distributor of sutures from various drug companies, including Ethicon, a division of Johnson&Johnson.

Just "too good" to throw out...
You can order unexpired and expired Panacryl and Vicryl from eSutures at a deep discount, although eSutures notes that the expired sutures are "for education, research and veterinary applications." Hmmm. Does that mean my vet might use these? The expired sutures are a bit cheaper.

The reason that supposedly "recalled" products are still sitting out there waiting to be used on some unsuspecting patient—human or animal—boils down to one word: Money. Someone is making or saving money by pushing these items into surgical supply cabinets, or leaving them there.

Ethicon has a current marketing promotion that rewards vets who buy large quantities of their sutures—large enough, maybe, to sit on their shelves for a long time. Ethicon is no long advertising Panacryl for sale, but it does offer Vicryl to the vets.

Free offer!
At the moment Ethicon is running an eye-catching ad for sutures linked to the Novartis Animal Health site of drug giant Novartis International AG. The ad shows a cute but sad-looking Lab puppy (maybe facing an operation and stitches?). Ethicon is offering a free suture rack ($100 value) if you make a qualifying purchase of 3 boxes of Ethicon sutures, plus 1 box each of Vetspon sponges, dental cubes and flex sheets. I don't know what those last three things are, but I guess I will have to order them to get the free "compact and attractive" suture rack.

And you can collect up to four suture racks with qualifying orders during the special promotion (while supplies last).

Panacryl recall
Panacryl sutures were voluntarily recalled by Ethicon, a Johnson&Johnson division, on March 28th, 2006, after a significant number of mostly abdominal surgery patients suffered alleged nasty after-effects from use of the sutures: painful infections, rejection (even through the skin), and granulomas, (lumps of unabsorbed sutures mixed with scar tissue). Ethicon's Vicryl sutures made it into the news in 1994 when a large quantity of sutures marketed under this name had to be recalled because of contamination. But according to the FDA only about one-quarter of the recalled sutures were ever actually recovered. So where did the rest end up?

You can find out things about the veterinary drug market more easily than you can about the marketing of drugs for humans, because, I guess, the drug companies have thought that animals were going to be less troublesome. Since the pet food recall, they may be rethinking that position.