alt Hacker NewsReally lovely article. In paramedicine we usually treat 10g of acetaminophen in a 24-hour window as a potentially fatal overdose. That's also why the law in Australia was changed to require acetaminophen to come in blister packs (harder to get each pill out) of no more than 16. At 500 mg, that only gets you up to 8 g if you eat the whole thing, which is still hopefully non-fatal.
I always thought a simple over-the-counter supplement (NAC) being the cure for an overdose was so cool. It's a pretty cool substance in a lot of ways, and this is a great spur to myself to research it more thoroughly.
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Could somebody package Tylenol with a sufficient amount of NAC to de-risk it? I suspect such a formulation would not require trials?
What does ingesting 10g of acetaminophen even look like? I've got to imagine the fatal dose is far, far, far lower with chronic usage. Finding out that people are ingesting grams is profoundly disturbing.
NAC is so amazing for us in terribly polluted areas. Also great before drinking
I've heard it suggested that acetaminophen just come with a small dose of NAC alongside it to make it safer. I guess this would require a lot of regulatory work to approve, but given that 500 people a year OD, it seems like a thing we should at least consider.
Meanwhile, it's funny that it seems like acetaminophen should safer in more scenarios, but the other has a lot of overdoses with typical use, I guess that's why there's a gap between the two, because ODs are apparently a lot more common or at least more legible than problems caused by the other drug.
When was this changed?
I arrived in Aus in 2021 and was amazed to be able to buy a pack of 40+, coming from the UK where the limit had been in place for some years.
You can still die if you take your idiot-proof Aussie blister packs with alcohol. So it's more an inefficient use of cabinet space.
You can overdose on water too, they haven't banned 5-gallon jugs (yet).
Here in Singapore NAC is sold to make muckus more liquid to alleviate coughs.
Apparently for some people it also helps with lessening tolerance for their ADHD meds, but I'm not so sure about that.