"Drug Hoarders, Manufacturing Cuts Exacerbate Shortage of Key Medications" PBS Newshour 8/29/2011
Excerpts
BETTY ANN BOWSER (Newshour): Just after Christmas, 55-year-old civil engineer Bruce Blair was handed a potential death sentence: acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive form of cancer that destroys healthy blood cells.
Normally, Blair's doctors in suburban Washington, D.C., would have inundated his body with cytarabine, a low-cost generic chemotherapy drug that cures a high percentage of cases.
But for Blair, there was no cytarabine, because it was one of the more than 180 critical drugs in short supply all over the country.
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BETTY ANN BOWSER: In June, the American Hospital Association surveyed its members and found 82 percent of patients who couldn't get medications on the shortage list experienced delayed treatment. For those who were given a substitute, 69 percent got less effective treatment.
The pharmacists who practice in those hospitals are especially concerned about the situation.
Joseph Hill is legislative director of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.
JOSEPH HILL, American Society of Health-System Pharmacists: This is really approaching crisis levels from our members' perspective. They are finding that they are having to scramble to find product, and there is certainly concern that care is going to be rationed.
BETTY ANN BOWSER: About 60 percent of all the critical drugs in short supply are generic sterile injectables like these. They come from the drug manufacturers in self-contained doses, ready to be injected.
They are mostly low-cost generics given in hospital settings. They are also critical drugs, ones used to keep patients in the intensive care unit alive, anti-cancer drugs for which there may be no substitute, and medications crucial for some surgeries.
Most of the other 40 percent on the shortage list are brand-name drugs still under U.S. government patents, for which there are no generic equivalents. And few of them are critical to patient care.
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BETTY ANN BOWSER: Exacerbating all of this is the gray market, where many hospitals have had to go to get critically needed drugs.
This is a market where unscrupulous suppliers hoard drugs in anticipation of a shortage, and, when it happens, they jack up the price. According to a recent survey done by Premier, a national information sharing service, the gray marketers have been asking hospitals to pay an average of 650 percent higher than the normal price for some oncology drugs and anesthesia products. And in most states, there is nothing illegal about this practice.
Drug maker Hospira, the company that produces roughly half of the cytarabine on the market, now makes its distributors sign contracts that keep suppliers from manipulating the drug's price. Federal legislation that would create an early warning system for FDA when shortages are about to occur is under consideration. And the Obama administration has been looking into setting up a national system to stockpile crucial drugs in short supply.
Meanwhile, Dr. Patel and others remain on the front line of a serious problem that has no end in sight.
DR. DIPTI PATEL: Frustrating, upsetting, exasperating. I -- I -- sometimes, it drives me absolutely up the wall.
I mean, when we are talking about diseases such as cancer, if you already have so many hurdles to conquer as a patient and as a family member and as a physician treating patients with cancer, and on top of that, this just outrageous external factor is just infuriating.
This brings a questions to mind: Is this "shortage" reflected world-wide?
Also, want to bet that Republicans will NOT see a need for regulations to address the issue of shortages of life-saving drugs because they are not profitable, or the profiteering by the "gray" drug suppliers? Hay, the party would loose all that BIG$ from Big-Pharma.
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