WASHINGTON – You check the expiration date on your milk, cottage cheese and orange juice.
Soon, the Food and Drug Administration will require an expiration date be stamped on your latex condoms.
The rule, which takes effect March 25, will require that both individual packages and condom boxes carry an expiration date.
The new rule follows FDA-sponsored testing that showed condoms can break, tear or leak if exposed to various conditions that age latex, such as heat and cold.
“I have never thought to check the expiration date,” said John de Castro, a senior at the University of Maryland. “If you buy something in the store you would expect that it wasn’t expired.”
Most manufacturers already put expiration dates on their condoms, although an FDA official said that is a recent development.
“Up until two years ago, expiration dating was not common,” said Donald E. Marlowe, the director of science and technology at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “Until recently, they only had a manufacturing date.”
FDA spokeswoman Sharon Snieder said that “there was no specific incident” that encouraged the FDA decision.
But condom companies insisted that printing an expiration date on packages is nothing new for them.
“We have always done that,” said Carol Carrozza, marketing director for Ansell, a New Jersey-based company that produces Lifestyles, Prime and Contempo brand condoms.
Carrozza said that Ansell uses air inflation, electronic, water-leakage, physical dimension, and age-accelerated testing to determine the shelf life of its products.
For lubricated condoms, the expiration date is usually five years, and for spermicidally lubricated condoms it is three, Carrozza said.
“I have never seen a condom that has not had an expiration date on it,” said Anne Anderson-Sawyer, coordinator for sexual health education programs at the University of Maryland Health Center.
Even “flavored” condoms carry expiration dates, according to Kevin Bean, president of Gasworks, a Florida-based company that distributes gag gifts.
“Each package of our FDA-approved flavored condoms has an expiration date,” Bean said. “I thought people had to put expiration dates on products.”
Bean said that “gag condoms” are not under the jurisdiction of the FDA, and do not carry expiration dates.
“Those are not medical devices,” Marlowe said. “Those are novelties.”
The companies said that condoms can break, not because of age, but because of misuse by consumers.
“We know for a fact that it is error-usage,” Carrozza said.
“It is a low-technology device, and most people look at it and don’t read instructions. They don’t realize that it is possible that you can use it inside out, or to store it improperly,” Carrozza said.
“Putting it in a wallet is one of the worst things that you can do to a condom, or throwing it in the bottom of a pocketbook where there can be sharp objects,” she said.
The prime reason given by professionals, said Anderson- Sawyer, is that condoms break if there is a lack of lubrication.
“Any workshop that we do talks about proper use and checking expiration dates,” she said.
Now that the dates will be stamped on packages, the challenge is to get consumers to check the dates. De Castro said he is a convert.
“In this day and age, with the diseases you can pick up it is really important that you are not using an old condom when the chemicals in the condom are no longer effective,” de Castro said.
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