A shocking investigation has just revealed serious contamination issues for blood pressure medications made in foreign factories. Drugs made at plants located in China and India are tainted with carcinogenic substances, according to a report from the FDA. Estimates suggest that one out of every three American adults takes a blood pressure medication. How many people will be affected by this recall is currently unknown.

Medications from at least 30 different companies were found to contain excessive amounts of carcinogenic material. The federal agency was forced to put out dozens of recalls for an array of blood pressure medications and other drugs in the last several months due to product contamination.

Of course, the agency isn’t that concerned. While they may have issued a recall on the tainted drugs, the FDA is still encouraging patients who’ve received contaminated medication to continue taking their prescription until their pharmacist gives them an untainted dose, or until they get a different prescription from their doctor.

Tainted drugs take over

As Daily Mail reports, the FDA has identified dozens of generic drugs containing valsartan, irbesartan and losartan that are actually contaminated with carcinogenic compounds. Other angiotensin II receptor blockers and ARB medicines may be contaminated as well.

UPI reports that the federal agency has found traces of up to three carcinogenic compounds in these drugs: NDMA, NDEA and NMBA, which are nitrosamines.

After announcing the widespread recall, the FDA is now trying to assure the public that they should keep taking their tainted medication.

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The affected drugs are used to treat high blood pressure and other heart conditions. These are the kinds of medications people take every day for years. Does the FDA even know how long this contamination has been going on?

According to reports, the nitrosamine contamination is due to a change in the way Chinese companies are producing the drugs. This change took place in 2011 — which means that American consumers have potentially been taking tainted medication for the last eight years.

Federal agencies are incompetent

The reality is that the FDA can only assume that not taking your heart medication is going to be worse for your health than taking it — and its an assumption they’re probably not properly equipped to make.

Earlier this year, the FDA and other federal agencies came under fire for failing to conduct adequate safety testing on other products like pesticides. Scientists said it was impossible for government agencies to predict what effects pesticides will have in the real word — and the same can be said of any other drug or chemical.

There’s no way for the FDA to really know what effects taking these tainted drugs will have on patients until after they’ve taken them — yet the FDA is advising people take the medications anyway.

“The risk associated with abruptly discontinuing the use of these important medicines far outweighs the low risk that our scientists estimate to be associated with continuing the medicine until the patient’s doctor or pharmacist provides a safe replacement or a different treatment option,” the FDA stated.

At this point, Americans have potentially been getting tainted drugs for nearly a decade — trust in the FDA should be at rock-bottom right now, if it wasn’t already there yet. According to USA Today, the FDA knew that many of these overseas factories were in shambles, but did nothing until an independent company did their own analysis and started ruffling feathers.

In addition to cancer, research has linked nitrosamine exposure to Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and other deleterious health conditions.