The Wall Street Journal reports that Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. has put a stop to its production of the generic version of the cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor. The company recently issued a recall of the drug as it investigates why tiny glass particles have appeared in some of the bottles. The Journal notes that the US Food and Drug Administration has said that it does not expect that there will be a shortage of the drug because there are other manufacturers who can provide adequate supply.

The New York Times reports that the FDA “said it had not received any reports of patients being harmed by the particles, which are about the size of a grain of sand. Earlier this month, Ranbaxy recalled more than 40 lots of the drug because of the glass contamination.” The Times notes that the Lipitor contamination is the latest in a series of manufacturing lapses at Ranbaxy, explaining that “the company has been operating under a court-ordered consent decree since January, one that federal authorities have called ‘unprecedented in scope,’ after they identified a host of manufacturing problems at the company’s plants in India and the United States, and concluded that Ranbaxy had submitted false data in drug applications to the F.D.A.”

From the American Association for Justice news release.