Proposed Legislation for Oncology Drug shortages-

nancygt

Please weigh in with your senators !
Amy Klobuchar and Bob Casey have proposed legislation to address oncology drug shoratges. If you research, you will find that there are serious ongoing oncology drug shorastges (If you are curious, there is full picture on FDA Drug Shortage website). This legislation will give early warning to healthcare providers and patients. Dr. Michael Link, Pres. of the ASCO American Society of Clinical Oncology says that "the oncology community continues to experience severe and worsening shortages of critical drugs and may threaten patient's lives as .. as without these critical components..not having these drugs may result in inferior results". These drugs are well established, effective and many have been around for 50 years or more: they include but are not limited to
Cisplatin
Carboplatin
Doxirubicin
etoposide
leucovorin
nitrogen mustard
vincristine
Most of these are on the OV Ca list and the first three are standards for Ovarian and Uterine Cancer.
All of these drugs, fortunately are ones that manufacturers plan to continue producing but article says shortages may have arisen from avialiability of raw material, lack of manufacturing capabilitie or mergers/acquisitions -one article said mfrs got blidsided by inreasing demand.
This situation is very personal to me as a stage 4 USPC patient-I had my second recurrence diagnosed on 10/26 and we wanted to use Cisplatin/Doxirubicin and waited until after the first of the year where mfrs. were starting to ship more quantities (but all remain on FDA shortage list). I started chemo on Jan. 20th and the two PET scnas did show real growth if not an alarming amount. This period was an agonizing time for me and I was lucky since my oncologist is a single doc practice in modest size town/medical community.
So again I urge you to read what you can about this legislation and if you agree, please let your senator know he needs to pay attention to this. I have written mine and told tthem I fully intend to make this post and later post how they voted.
Ha!Ha! maybe they could convert a few factories from Viagra type drugs as all the ads you see certainly make me think they have plenty of manufacturing capacity there.