You can almost hear the phones of ob-gyns ringing off the hook with the breaking of this story. Drug manufacturer Pfizer has issued a recall of a particular kind of birth control pill because some packets of the product were sent out with pills in the wrong order. With 1 million packets being subject to the recall, there's a chance some women in South Carolina might be affected. It may be too late for some, though. The pills were distributed sometime last year.

Pfizer says it doesn't think any more than about 30 packets were tainted by the dosage mix up, but as one woman suggests, that may be 30 too many. She points out that birth control is taken for a reason and if the product is defective, or for some reason dosing gets mixed up, she says "it could change your life."

The drug in question is Lo/Ovral-28 and its generic equivalents called norgestrel and ethinyl estradiol. In a normal monthly dose pack, a woman receives 28 day's worth of the prescription. Most of those pills have the active ingredient. Seven are placebos and usually are a different color. Proper dosing requires that women take the placebo pills in specific order with the rest. If they get mixed up and they happen to take three placebos in a row, women can be left unprotected.

Pharmacists say Lo/Ovral is an older form of birth control that isn't commonly prescribed these days. And while they say there should be little reason to panic, some doctors say women should be concerned.

Pfizer says the packets are pink with the drug's brand name or generic name on it, along with the name Akrimax, the company that sells the drug in the United States. Pfizer's logo is not on the package.

Source: The Washington Post, "Largest drug maker recalls 1 million birth control packets because pills could be out of order," Associated Press, Feb. 1, 2012