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Baking Soda Shortage Has Hospitals Frantic, Delaying Treatments and Surgeries (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amid a national shortage of a critical medicine, US hospitals are hoarding vials, delaying surgeries, and turning away patients, The New York Times reports. The medicine in short supply: solutions of sodium bicarbonate -- aka, baking soda. The simple drug is used in all sorts of treatments, from chemotherapies to those for organ failure. It can help correct the pH of blood and ease the pain of stitches. It is used in open-heart surgery, can help reverse poisonings, and is kept on emergency crash carts. But, however basic and life-saving, the drug has been in short supply since around February. The country's two suppliers, Pfizer and Amphastar, ran low following an issue with one of Pfizer's suppliers -- the issue was undisclosed due to confidentiality agreements. Amphastar's supplies took a hit with a spike in demand from desperate Pfizer customers. Both companies told the NYT that they don't know when exactly supplies will be restored. They speculate that it will be no earlier than June or August. With the shortage of sodium bicarbonate, hospitals are postponing surgeries and chemotherapy treatments. A hospital in Mobile, Alabama, for example, postponed seven open-heart surgeries and sent one critically ill patient to another hospital due to the shortage.
My local Office Depot has some "Commercial Grade" Baking Soda available, made by some other supplier named "Arm & Hammer". It's in stock, and $1.39 for a pound of it.
Is this shortage happening in countries with "socialized medicine", or just in free market America?
Why not go all the way and produce it in nuclear power plants?
has a 3D printer so they can just make more?
This is what happens when you manage your supply chain to maximize profit.
I'm sure US hospitals are hoarding these vials in preparation to ship them to some miserable 3rd-world country with an incredibly underdeveloped healthcare system, but the article misses to tell us which country that is... right?
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Hmmm ?
He has been known to do this.
One of the major global producers of medical grade baking soda went bankrupt a few years ago, the Australian company Penrice. It wasn't able to compete against the US soda ash cartel, which dumped soda ash into the Australian market.
Soda ash, or sodium carbonate, is mostly used to manufacture glass. The US has large naturally-occurring deposits of it, whereas other parts of the world produce it via the Solvay process, which involves heating limestone with salt.
Penrice was spun out of ICI Australia, which has subsequently became known as Orica, Ixom and Dulux Group
And the role of a pharmacists as a chemist is long gone.mixing and compounding substances to be used by humans topically and injected. Only a billion dollar company is willing to take the risk of marking up a common compound and selling at thousands of dollars per oz in the 1st world. Pharmasists are now the ones who are listed on the liability policy and monitor the pill dispensing machine.
FDA approval and the guarantee that it is pure. Hospitals pay for that stuff even though there is no reason that an average lab couldn't produce similar qualities, the brand name of the product would probably have to go through FDA approval which can take years.
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Obamacare!
The whole problem that neither the free market or the socialized system completely solves is the basic reality is that people don't want to work and shucks, no one really wants to compete, either.
Competition is a lot of work and the simplest way to make money is to try and be in a business that can avoid it. The easiest way to do that is to churn out intellectual property and rely on the regulated monopoly to attract investment in that property. In systems where there is no intellectual property, then, the next best way to avoid competition is through scale. In fact, big companies make use of both today - they invest capital enough to differentiate themselves, and then they sit on it as long as they can. If a company wins completely in the marketplace, the smartest move is to raise prices. If you have a nimbler competitor, he or she might just instead simply sell out, because, again, most people don't want to work.
In socialized systems, there's never a part where you get to get rich and sell out, and then not work, so the easiest way to avoid work is to simply do as little as one can get away with. Since everyone is doing as little as one can get away with, smart people with no opportunity for advancement figure out exactly what is just enough to move them ahead commensurate to what the risk is, and social stagnation ensues. But pretty much, the end game of either a free market sector that is mature versus one that is run by the government, is a bunch of people sitting on top of a monopoly sufficient to last their lives, they hope, so they can get paid and not have to work all that much.
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I use a ton of baking soda to adjust my swimming pool PH. Looks like I'm fine. Such a relief.
See, without the great and wise FDA's policies of looking out for the people by allowing the concentration of critical supplies and medicines into the hands of 2 such wise and benevolent entities we'd not be in a position where decisions made entirely for profit could affect the lives of the general public. As much as I hate to see people suffer, I almost wish there would be deaths as a result of this and that forced some legal light onto the situation. Critical basics that are free from patent should required to be multiply sourced to ensure a steady interruption free supply chain, not concentrated into one or two 'most' profitable and controllable streams.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
How is Arm & Hammer not in on this game?
I think we can all agree that the pharmaceutical grade is what hospitals should use. However, if they cannot get it then the potential risks of using a non-pharmaceutical grade product should be compared against not having the treatment which uses it.
For example, if it is used to treat poisoning and the patient will probably die without baking soda it might be worth the risk of commercial grade baking soda. Similarly, open heart surgery sounds pretty serious and might be something which is potentially very risky to delay so the risks of using a less-pure baking soda may be less than the risk of not doing the procedure which requires it.
Why not? /s
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I once worked in the analytical laboratory at J.T. Baker as an analytical chemist. I personally tested NaHCO3 among many other chemicals to USP, FCC, and ACS standards. We had a warehouse with plenty of barrels of these kinds of commodities. Also, I seem to recall that the ordinary box of Arm&Hammer on the supermarket shelf is actually very high quality material, almost pure enough to use for creating primary standard grade sodium carbonate by baking out some water and CO2 at a specific temp.
Note that the costs to certify to USP grade are little different than for the other grades. It is important to understand that many chemicals which come into a chemical plant never require any further purification. In such cases, a portion is split off to be packaged as ACS, another portion goes in the USP bottles, etc. The remainder can be sold off as "Technical" grade if there isn't enough room to store it. If there is room, it might be preferable to store the raw material that meets the higher specs. rather than sell it all off as tech. grade, because the next load that comes in might not meet the requirements for certs. and thus would need to go through a purification process.
What's sad about this story is that because of the regulatory/liability state, it is impossible to engage in simple acts of innovation ("winging it") that could solve problems such as this "shortage." E.g.:
Find a chemical company with some barrels of bicarb. that has been tested to one of the specs., or USP if possible. If they don't have the USP, then have them test the ACS or FCC to the USP std., which would probably pass if it already met one of the other stds.
Then just procure the damn stuff!
If additional sterilization is needed, have the truck routed to an accessible sterilization service. Ie., a facility with a gamma ray sterilization unit, where the material could simply be put on a belt and sent through the rays.
Hospitals should have the capability to filter small lots of solution to further remove any particulates if necessary.
But no, we'd rather incur large risks of an actual death to a patient to stave off some tiny risk.
What a pathetic thing we have become.
hospitals could allocate the pharmacy grade stuff for the open heart and use the industrial/food graded stuff for things like the bandage itching. Have the patient sign off on it. And as an incentive, charge the patient the buck it costs for the food grade product if they are willing to use it instead of the 100 they'd charge for the pharma grade.But oh, common sense, not in medicine. This is why an aspirin costs 10 bucks a pill at a hospital.
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Unnamed in TFA, anyone know? Here is my guess: a supplier in China who also happens to be the supplier for Amphastar. Similar to the melamine dog food fiasco where we found almost every dog food brand sourced from the exact same factory.
Highly optimised systems get increasingly fragile. A highly optimised market for drugs will falter on the slightest off-the-regular imbalance. Same goes for IT services. Imagine everything running on and with Google in 3 decades. And Google then having some kind of hickup that puts the entire society of humanity to a grinding halt for a few days. Or weeks.
A Utopia would have to be built taking this systemic problem into account. But then again, this might not be the best example. As we all know, the US medical system is about as far away from Utopia as it gets.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
This is the smoking gun, people. The fact that the situation is constrained by secret agreements between players shows that no free market existed.
The "free market" is a myth, and it has always been a myth. Without some independent mechanism to enforce honest behavior any market will become a criminal extortion enterprise. That is why there are laws against raising prices in emergencies. Otherwise bottled water and cans of food would go up by double digit amounts in case of a hurricane, tornado or earthquake, and people might even die as a result.
Of course these days it doesn't take a catastrophe for greedy corporations to charge obscene prices. Epi-Pen, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, and Turing Pharmaceuticals have all engaged in extortion pricing after acquiring existing drugs. This is life threatening and gouges the taxpayer as well.
The history of food and drug regulation in the US is the history of mass poisoning as a result of ignorance, greed and lack of regulation. All the comments about the "ebil gobment" blocking noble free enterprise are right wing masturbatory fantasies.
The biggest issue we face is regulatory capture where special interests take over the government agencies that are supposed to keep them in check. Examples are the revolving door between the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry or the end of Net Neutrality at the hands of the telecommunication cartel.
It's not about the government squashing the free market, it's about corrupt powerful monopolies using the government to enforce their dictatorial control over the economy.
Why is Snark Required?
Is this how he wants to make America great again? Or is that the outcome of his health care legislation: we offer everything, but you won't get any of it.
Doofensmirtz Evil Incorporated just announced a plan to use a giant baking soda volcano to take over the ENTIRE Tri-State area! Their stock is up 5 points after the announcement.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
But muh free markets!
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
for something this critical. That's the part that shouldn't be left to the free market. We do the same with our food supply through subsidies. When stuff matters we don't leave it to the free market. If we did we'd still have dust bowls and food shortages.
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Let's euthanize everybody. It's the humane thing to do.
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Time for those who are in need of chemotherapy treatment to go to Mexico and get the easier treatment for cancer that was proven to work back in the 40s or 50s.
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we subsidize the growing of unprofitable crops to ensure diversity. We subsidize specific behavior too (like crop rotation). Our food supply is heavily controlled by our government and largely for the better.
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