“Stephanie Scanlan learned about the shortages of basic chemotherapy drugs this spring in the most frightening way. Two of the three drugs typically used to treat her rare bone cancer were too scarce. She would have to go forward without them,” Christina Jewett writes over at The New York Times. “Ms. Scanlan, 56, the manager of a busy state office in Tallahassee, Fla., had sought the drugs for months as the cancer spread from her wrist to her rib to her spine. By summer it was clear that her left wrist and hand would need to be amputated. ‘I’m scared to death,’ she said as she faced the surgery. ‘This is America. Why are we having to choose who we save?’ The disruption this year in supplies of key chemotherapy drugs has realized the worst fears of patients — and of the broader health system — because some people with aggressive cancers have been unable to get the treatment they need. Those medications and hundreds of other generic drugs, including amoxicillin to treat infections and fentanyl to quell pain during surgery, remain in short supply. But the deepening crisis has not fostered solutions to improve the delivery of generic drugs, which make up 90 percent of prescriptions in the United States. Dr. Robert Califf, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, has outlined changes the agency could make to improve the situation. But he said the root of the problem ‘is due to economic factors that we don’t control.’ ‘They’re beyond the remit of the F.D.A.,’ he said. … One survey released in August found that nearly 60 percent of more than 1,000 pharmacy respondents deemed chemotherapy drug shortages ‘critically impactful.’ ” Christina Jewett, “Behind the shortages keeping cancer patients from chemo,” The New York Times.
