On Wednesday, Dianne Nomikos, 65, went to M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for a 9 a.m. appointment to receive Doxil, a (vital) medicine for her ovarian cancer. She was told to go home and wait until new supplies arrived.
“My life is in jeopardy,” she said through tears in a telephone interview. “Without the drug, who knows what’s going to( happen) to me?”
The Obama administration is considering creating a government stockpile of crucial cancer medicines. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already stockpile antibiotics, antidotes and other drugs needed in the event of a terrorist attack or earthquake.
Under one plan, the government would store the dry ingredients for cancer drugs and, in the face of a shortage, distribute them to hospitals, where pharmacists could mix them into (injectable) compounds.
Dr. Richard Schilsky, a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, said the number of cancers (diagnosed) in a year was easy to predict. “So we ought to be able to make a pretty good estimate of the grams required to treat every patient in the country in any given year,” he said.
Legislation proposed in both the House and the Senate would give the Food and Drug Administration the power to demand that drug makers give early warnings of possible supply (disruptions). Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, said the idea behind the bipartisan bill came after she found that the agency had prevented 38 shortages last year after getting early alerts of problems at drug makers.