'Crisis': Supplies of life-saving drug used to treat children could run out in 2 week

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46351047/ns/health-the_new_york_times/

A crucial medicine to treat childhood leukemia is in such short supply that hospitals across the country may exhaust their stores within the next two weeks, leaving hundreds and perhaps thousands of children at risk of dying from a largely curable disease, federal officials and cancer doctors say.

“This is dire,” said Valerie Jensen, associate director of the Food and Drug Administration’s drug shortages program. “Supplies are just not meeting demand.”

The drug is methotrexate, and the cancer it treats is known as acute lymphoblastic leukemia, or A.L.L., which most often strikes children ages 2 to 5.
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Ben Venue Laboratories was one of the nation’s largest suppliers of injectable preservative-free methotrexate, but the company voluntarily suspended operations at its plant in Bedford, Ohio, in November because of “significant manufacturing and quality concerns,” the company announced.
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“This is a crisis that I hope the F.D.A.’s hard work can help to avert,” said Dr. Michael P. Link, president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. “We have worked very hard to take what was an incurable disease and make it curable for 90 percent of the cases. But if we can’t get this drug anymore, that sets us back decades.”


More at link....

I believe they use that for rheumatoid arthritis, too.

I hope this isn't due to the political season and the fact that it's also used as an abortifacient.

Methotrexate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'm a bit annoyed that it's gotten to the 2-week supply crisis stage. One company suspended its operations in November and it's February now ... did they immediately start working with all the other companies to ramp up their production? I realize that contracts etc. take time but it seems ridiculous to me that hospitals across the entire country could run out because one (albeit one of the largest) company halts production.

We all recall the flu shot shortage, right? These self-created "shortages" seem to be a contemporary business plan. Don't they teach ethics anymore? Is everything warlike and accepting atrocities like a wake of dead children as a cost of doing business-- in HEALTHCARE, no less?! These kinds of moves (or, oops, lapses in management) are no better/different, in my eyes, than the run of the mill killers we read about every day on these threads, and THAT is sickening. moo

:furious:

No excuse for this in America.

This probably all comes down to money. Not lucrative enough to make the drug and/or not lucrative enough to take some action when the main manufacturer of the drug goes offline. I'll betcha. :twocents:

BuzzieCat said:

This probably all comes down to money. Not lucrative enough to make the drug and/or not lucrative enough to take some action when the main manufacturer of the drug goes offline. I'll betcha. :twocents:

Click to expand...

If these companies are trying to make a profit and drug is cheap once it becomes generic then the government has to step in, clearly.