To the editor:

Although I admire pharmacist Rick Acheson’s concern for safe medications. I find little comfort in the FDA’s “stringent guidelines for medications” as he stated in his Aug. 7 letter to the editor.

One only needs to look at the failure of the FDA in regulating the most dangerous and neurotoxic substance, thimerosal. Thimerosal is 50 percent mercury and is used as a preservative and antibacterial agent in vaccines.

The FDA has allowed this preservative to remain in vaccines after years of warnings that connected thimerosal to neurodevelopmental delays. The risk associated with mercury use in medicine goes back to the early 1890s.

The FDA failed to require drug manufacturers adequately test the use of thimerosal in childhood vaccines. When was that last time you saw a mercury thermometer? Thimerosal was removed from pet vaccines in 1992 because of adverse reactions.

The majority of the drugs being delivered to Kansas were actually manufactured by American pharmaceutical companies in the United States. To assume that they became unsafe when purchased, for a fraction of the price, in Canada, would mean that someone tampered with the product or they were never safe. We, as United States consumers, pay the high price for ethical pharmaceutical products because of the advertising dollars spent.

Linda Weinmaster,

Lawrence