Monthly Archives: May 2014

Drug shortages: “We are talking about people’s lives; this is not a cell phone contract”

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iv-fluidThe shortage of pharmaceutical drugs is a serious problem in the US. The number of drugs in short supply has tripled since 2007. In an article in The New York Times, Sabrina Tavernise reports that the number of drugs in short supply in 2012 was 456.

The types of drugs affected cover a very wide range and include such things as cancer drugs and nitroglycerine used in heart surgeries. The situation is quite disruptive for hospitals, doctors (especially oncologists), and patients.

IV fluid shortage threatens patient care

This year, in addition to drug shortages, there is a nationwide shortage of IV fluid. Intravenous therapy is essential for treating dehydration and electrolyte imbalances, for blood transfusions, and for delivering medications such as those used in chemotherapy. IV fluid is a hospital staple.

A recent JAMA article quotes Erin R. Fox, director of the Drug Information Service at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City: (emphasis added in the following quotations)

“It’s maddeningly frustrating that we don’t have these basics.” … Fox said that although shortages of drugs, particularly sterile injectables, have become common in recent years, it is unheard-of to have a shortage of such a basic supply. …

“Why is the supply chain so fragile that it creates a national crisis? asked Fox. …

“Physicians, nurses, and pharmacists are working together to minimize the harm to patients, but it is really a challenge,” she said.

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Going extinct

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Red-eyed tree frogs
Red-eyed tree frogs
Animal species are going extinct at a rate thousands of times faster than was the case before there were humans. And this is a conservative estimate.

At least half the tortoises and turtles, a third of the amphibians, a quarter of the mammals, and an eighth of the birds on this planet face a risk of extinction in the near future. What’s worse, these numbers apply only to the small fraction of known species whose conservation status has actually been assessed. The overall picture is likely to be much worse.

This from a review of the book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert. The reviewer is columnist and author Verlyn Klinkenborg (The Rural Life).

It’s not just climate change. It’s our way of life.

It’s not just climate change that accounts for the increased rate of species extinction. (emphasis added in the following quotations)

The general tendency of our species—a tendency that seems to be intensifying all the time—is to decrease biological diversity on this planet. We do so by destroying habitats, overconsuming natural resources, and spreading invasive species, willingly or not. It’s tempting to say that this is the cost of consciousness. We like to imagine that cultural diversity is an adequate substitute for biological diversity—for ourselves, if not for other species. It isn’t.

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Climate change and deconstruction

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Home in Union Beach, NJ after Hurricane Sandy
A home in Union Beach, NJ after Hurricane Sandy
In a recent essay on climate change, Zadie Smith touches on matters not usually mentioned in connection with this topic. “What’s missing from the account,” she says, “is how much of our reaction is emotional.”

Smith is the mother of two young children. She imagines how, in the year 2050, she would explain to a hypothetical granddaughter why previous generations failed to act. (emphasis added)

I don’t expect she will forgive me, but it might be useful for her to get a glimpse into the mindset, if only for the purposes of comprehension. What shall I tell her? Her teachers will already have explained that what was happening to the weather, in 2014, was an inconvenient truth, financially, politically—but that’s perfectly obvious, even now. A global movement of the people might have forced it onto the political agenda, no matter the cost. What she will want to know is why this movement took so long to materialize. So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we’d just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes—and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat.

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Teaching the oligarchy not to care

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Abimbola "BIM" Fernandez at home
Chris Hayes sometimes gets dismissed as just another commentator on a failing liberal TV network, but I found his book Twilight of the Elites a perceptive, well-written account of how American meritocracy perpetuates inequality.

Hayes recently reviewed the book Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s Post-Crash Recruits by Kevin Roose. The book follows the lives of eight young men — recruited to be investment bankers — during the first two years of their employment on Wall Street.

I especially liked this passage from Hayes’ review:

Why, one might ask, in an economy in which 49 million Americans are poor and the median household income hovers around $51,000, should we care about the psychic plight of 23-year-olds making $90,000? Because these are the people who run our country, and the process by which their own empathetic faculties are destroyed is a key part of how this entire corrupt finance-state is maintained.

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Pharma finds creative new ways to be reprehensible

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brand-vs-generic-drugsThe pharmaceutical industry is in the business of making profits. It’s not in the business of improving the health of individuals or populations, nor does it care about the cost of health care, even as those costs spiral out of control in the US.

This is hardly news, I know. The behavior of pharma, along with its reputation, has perhaps sunk lower than that of the tobacco industry. Public disapproval and huge monetary fines for illegal activities have no impact. In its quest for profits, pharma finds creative new ways to sink to ever greater depths.

An article in a recent issue of The New England Journal of Medicine illustrates this. Read more

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