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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.
Purity.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
There are always shortages - it's just not apparent to the average Slashdotter. This page lists current and past drug shortages going back to 2010.
Here's the Canadian version.
There seems to be a similar site for the EU, though the page says most shortages are handled by the individual national governments. I'd check the French or German health websites, but I'm not good in those languages. The UK seems to have ceased tracking shortages.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
1. Purity. Guaranteed absolutely free of anything that could be dangerous if injected.
2. Sterility. No microbes. Hermetic seal container made free of life at the factory.
3. A paper trail saying where it was made, when, and who shipped it where, for use in identifying any contamination that does occur.
4. Someone who can be sued if all the above fails.
The "free market" never existed, it's a construct of man's imagination, but let's set that aside for a moment while we talk about something more serious - Life or death serious. Health care. Physicians follow a code to do no harm. Drug companies have no such compunctions. There is no business imperative, regulation, general guideline or established best practice to maintain production of CRITICAL, EVERYDAY PRODUCTS that the world needs lots of. There is NO safety net. There is no planned economy government entity saying "well, if we really need to have bicarb, we need to make it ourselves and maintain that production capability." There is nothing like that for any substance except petroleum.
You say "purity and packaging" as if it's no big deal. It's a very big deal for something you're going to inject into someone's bloodstream. Take some common fungal spores which might not even count as contamination in food, inject them into patients and you could be facing horrific medical consequences on a massive scale.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Let's restate "purity" in terms that someone at your level will understand. It has less shit in it that shouldn't be there. Kind of important when you're using it in medical procedures, not so important in industrial procedures.
It's a perfectly simple concept to understand so I'm not sure why you're having so much trouble. If the stuff available from Wacko's Online Emporium was as pure as what's required for medical procedures, there wouldn't be A FUCKING SHORTAGE.
Well expressed. I recently looked into the price of rattlesnake antivenin in the US and was astounded to see it costing up to $10000 per vial. A little searching revealed the cost of production was estimated to be about $14.
Link to an article discussing the costs:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
Link to a research paper by the person responsible for creating the antivenin:
https://www.researchgate.net/p...
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
Purity.
Not exactly. Both food grade and pharma grade sodium bicarbonate are greater than 99% "pure". Many industrial producers make both food and pharma grade sodium bicarbonate, some of them on the same line and processed to the same purity level...
The difference is that Pharma grade sodium bicarbonate is specifically tested to assure very small levels of certain specific impurities** mostly to minimize potential issues with inconvenient formation of various precipitates and other complications in equipment (e.g., hemodialysis), or your body.
All that product testing/certification isn't cheap and is completely unnecessary if you are simply eating it. For example, if 0.05% of the impurity was NaCl or MgCl, that would *bad* in your blood, but if you ate the typical amount of bicarbonate, you wouldn't even notice that impurity.
**USP has specific tests for impurities such as Chloride (0.015%), Sulfur (0.015%), Aluminium (2ug/g), Arsenic (2ppm), Calcium (0.01%), Magnesium (0.004%), Copper (1ppm). Iron (5ppm), Ammonia (20ppm), Organics (0.01%), etc...
That system exists, and it's why medical billing is a speciality in and of itself. It's called the ICD-10, and has been around for decades. The pushback is because the latest revision, which went into effect two years ago, is hyper-specific to the point of absurdity.
Pecked by a chicken? There's a code for that: W61.33. But don't you dare get that confused with getting pecked by a turkey or bitten by a duck, which are W61.43 and W61.61 respectively. Don't like your in-laws? That's Z63.1. Injured? It's very important for proper diagnosis to know if you were at the library at the time (Y92.241) or at the opera (Y92.253). Shredding it on water so awesomely that your skis catch on fire? Not only is there a code for that, there are three sub-codes to describe the diagnosis in greater detail. I am not making this up.. You know all those Imperials who died when those two Star Destroyers collided in Rogue one? That's V95.43. And it only gets more wacky from there.
Now do you see why there's been some pushback?
Imagine all the people...
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?