Tonight's picture was taken on October 8, 2006. This is one of my favorite photos. We took Mattie to Butler's Orchard in Maryland that weekend. He loved to ride a hay wagon out to the pumpkin patch and pick his own pumpkins. My two Farmer Browns hard at work!
Quote of the day: The shortages tend disproportionately to involve older, generic injectable drugs (which are exactly the types of drugs used to treat children with cancer), which are difficult to manufacture but command low prices, a combination that often leads manufacturers to get out of the business of making them. ~ Roni Caryn Rabin
If you are connected to the childhood cancer community in anyway, then this week you most likely have heard about the drug vincristine. It is typically used to treat children with lymphoma, leukemia, and brain tumors. Well it turns out there is a vincristine shortage because one pharmaceutical company made the "business decision to discontinue the drug." Amazing isn't that a pharmaceutical company can decide to withdraw from making a drug and yet the FDA doesn't mandate some sort of exit strategy, in order to give other companies time to meet the drug's demand.
Doctors are scrambling as they try to figure out how to treat their pediatric patients. However, they do not make dosage decisions in isolation. Instead, there are medical protocols that all cancer institutions follow. Which means that these research protocols need to be changed immediately, so that hospitals around the country know how to care for children with cancer. How would you like to be a doctor struggling to figure out how to treat a child with cancer, knowing that you do not have an adequate supply of a drug for treatment? What do you do? Give half dosages or skip dosages? The medical community is in a quandary.
However, what isn't the focus in these articles is the psychosocial consequences! Naturally! In fact, many parents of children with cancer found out about this shortage this week NOT from their doctor! They found out by reading a New York Times article! How would you feel as a parent if this happened to you? The childhood cancer community is outraged. Parents rely on their child's doctor and all sensitive information like this, is expected to come from the health care team. NOT FROM THE MEDIA! Knowing your child has been diagnosed with cancer is hard enough, but to learn through a newspaper or TV about a drug shortage makes every aspect of this ten times harder.
The one piece of good news is that Pfizer, the other drug company who manufactures this drug, said it has now taken steps to expedite additional shipments of this critical drug over the next few weeks to support three to four times their typical production output. I can only imagine the state of helplessness that parents are facing this week, as they worry about whether their child's hospital pharmacy has access to vincristine.
Faced With a Drug Shortfall, Doctors Scramble to Treat Children With Cancer:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/health/cancer-drug-shortage.html
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