J&J recall streak continues with moldy schizophrenia drug

It hasn't been a great couple of weeks for Johnson & Johnson. After recently recalling some 200,000 bottles of Motrin Infants' Drops, Wednesday the company ($JNJ) announced its second recall in as many weeks, this time for a schizophrenia drug.

As Bloomberg reports, a routine analysis yielded news that one lot of Risperdal Consta was contaminated with a mold found commonly in the environment, said Robyn Reed Frenze, a spokeswoman for the company's Janssen unit. As a result, the company has recalled 5,000 vials of the drug, a long-acting injectable treatment not to be confused with the oral med Risperdal.

The 5,000 recalled vials, remaining from the 70,000 originally manufactured, are for the most part with wholesalers or distributors or in pharmacy or doctor's offices, Bloomberg reports. No patients have reported complaints, Frenze told the news service, but J&J thought it important to notify doctors and patients of the risks, which include injection-site reactions. "The risk to patients is low," Frenze said. "We don't want to create unnecessary concern."

Manufacturing issues have plagued J&J as of late, last week forcing the company's McNeil Consumer Healthcare unit to recall three lots of Motrin Infants' Drops due to the appearance of plastic particles in the drug's API. That was just the latest in a series of OTC manufacturing issues for the company, which has faced problems with products like Tylenol both at home and abroad; in May, South Korea launched a criminal investigation after the Janssen unit waited a month to report that some Children's Tylenol products contained excessive levels of acetaminophen.

But as Bloomberg points out, OTC is not the only area of business whose manufacturing woes have troubled J&J. The pharma giant currently faces thousands of lawsuits after recalling 93,000 hip implants back in August, 2010.

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