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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.
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.
Is this shortage happening in countries with "socialized medicine", or just in free market America?
We don't have a free market medical system. We have a cronyist monopoly enforced by laws written by hospitals and pharma company. If the medical system produced computers, a PC would cost about the same as a Lamborghini.
There is :
- ensuring everything is done in a sterile environment
- ensuring its purity
- testing of batches
- tracing and tracking the whole process
- precise weighing and packaging
- ensuring everything is in tamper proof packaging
- auditing of the whole process
All the equipment used in the manufacture, testing, packaging and the people involved are also traced and certified, with everything going back to calibrated National Standards and tested annually (or more). The temperature, humidity, raw materials, etc etc etc etc etc are all tracked right through the whole system in triplicate.
This is not a "throw a teaspoon full in" and it will be all OK.
Ingesting something (and we all swallow a low of bugs, insects, dirt, etc every year) is totally different to having it injected into the blood stream,
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.
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...
The ordinary Walmart product is pure enough for human consumption, as a tooth powder and stomach remedy. My example is chemical reagent purity.