Thank you for supporting our journalism. This article is available exclusively for our subscribers, who help fund our work at the Chicago Tribune.Chemotherapy drugs are administered to a patient at a hospital in Chapel Hill, N.C., in 2017. A growing shortage of common cancer treatments is forcing doctors to switch medications and delaying care, prominent U.S. cancer centers say.
“We at Cook County Health are finding we do not have access to the critical drugs we need to take care of our patients,” Patel said. “It’s too soon to know what the full ramifications of this will be, but if the shortages continue we expect to see worse outcomes, longer durations of treatment, worse side effects, likely increased risk of cancer recurrence and even death.
“If we don’t have access to cisplatin, a highly curable cancer can turn into something that is fatal,” Tan said. The problem is that one company made about half of the cisplatin used in the U.S., and an inspection late last year uncovered quality problems at the company’s plant in India that produced the drug, said Erin Fox, associate chief pharmacy officer for shared services at University of Utah Health. That plant had to pause production.