TRENTON, N.J. — A severe shortage of drugs for chemotherapy, infections and other serious ailments is endangering patients and forcing hospitals to buy lifesaving medications from secondary suppliers at huge markups because they can’t get them any other way.
An Associated Press review of industry reports and interviews with nearly two dozen experts found at least 15 deaths in the past 15 months blamed on the shortages, either because the right drug wasn’t available or because of dosing errors or other problems in administering or preparing alternative medications.
The shortages, mainly involving widely used generic injected drugs that ordinarily are cheap, have been delaying surgeries and cancer treatments, leaving patients in unnecessary pain and forcing hospitals to give less-effective treatments. That’s resulted in complications and longer hospital stays.
Just over half of the 549 U.S. hospitals responding to a survey this summer by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a patient safety group, said they had purchased one or more prescription drugs from so-called “gray market vendors” — companies other than their normal wholesalers. Most also said they’ve had to do so more often of late, and 7 percent reported side effects or other problems.
Hospital pharmacists “are really looking at this as a crisis. They are scrambling to find drugs,” said Joseph Hill of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.
The Food and Drug Administration is holding a meeting Monday with medical and consumer groups, researchers and industry representatives to discuss the shortages and strategies to fight them.
The FDA says the primary cause of the shortages is production shutdowns because of manufacturing problems, such as contamination and metal particles that get into medicine.
Other reasons:
• Companies abandoning the injected generic drug market because the profit margins are slim. Producing these sterile medicines is far more complicated and expensive than stamping out pills, and it can take about three weeks to produce a batch. Making things worse, companies don’t have to notify customers or the FDA that they’ve stopped making a medicine. That means neither FDA nor competitors can try to fill the gap.
• Only a half-dozen companies make the vast majority of injected generics. Even if other companies wanted to begin making a generic drug in short supply, they’re discouraged by the lengthy, expensive process of setting up new manufacturing lines and getting FDA approval.
• Theft of prescription drugs from warehouses or during shipment.
• Secondary, “gray market” vendors who buy scarce drugs from small regional wholesalers, pharmacies or other sources and then market them to hospitals, often at many times the normal price. These sellers may not be licensed, authorized distributors.
Hospitals that buy scarce medicines from the “gray market” are taking a gamble.
The drugs may be stolen and hospitals can’t always tell whether a medicine was properly refrigerated, as required for many injectable drugs, or whether it’s past the expiration date, said Michael R. Cohen, a pharmacist and president of the institute. Either way, the active ingredient might have degraded and the drug might not work well or could harm the patient, he said.
Mr. Cohen attributes at least 15 recent of deaths to drug shortages based on reports by medical personnel, but says many deaths and injuries go unreported.
In the worst known case, Alabama’s public health department this spring reported nine deaths and 10 patients harmed due to bacterial contamination of a hand-mixed batch of liquid nutrition given via feeding tubes because the sterile pre-mixed liquid wasn’t available.
So far this year, 210 drugs have been added to the list of drugs in short supply, one less than the total for all of last year, according to the University of Utah Drug Information Service, which tracks the shortages. That’s triple the roughly 70 a year from 2003 to 2006, when shortages began to climb steadily.
“The shortages aren’t resolving. They’re piling up on top of existing ones,” said Erin Fox, a pharmacist who manages the service. She said at least 55 drugs from shortages before this year are still unavailable or scarce.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.