Showing posts with label shortages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shortages. Show all posts

Sunday 9 December 2018

Production Of A New Type Of Flu Vaccine Launched In The USA

Production Of A New Type Of Flu Vaccine Launched In The USA.
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a new specimen of flu vaccine, the energy announced Wednesday. Flublok, as the vaccine is called, does not use the usual method of the influenza virus or eggs in its production. Instead, it is made using an "insect virus (baculovirus) phrasing system and recombinant DNA technology," the FDA said in a news release. This will add vaccine maker Protein Sciences Corp, of Meriden, Conn, to produce Flublok in muscular quantities, the agency added.

The vaccine is approved for use in those aged 18 to 49. "This acceptance represents a technological advance in the manufacturing of an influenza vaccine," said Dr Karen Midthun, the man of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. "The new technology offers the hidden for faster start-up of the vaccine manufacturing process in the event of a pandemic, because it is not dependent on an egg equip or on availability of the influenza virus".

While the technology is new to flu vaccine production, it has been employed in the making of vaccines that baulk other infectious diseases, the agency noted. As it does with all influenza vaccines, the FDA will assess Flublok before each flu season. In analyse conducted at various sites in the United States, Flublok was about 45 percent essential against all circulating influenza strains, not just the strains that matched those in the vaccine.

The most commonly reported adverse reactions included trial at the site of injection, headache, enervation and muscle aches - events also typical for conventional flu vaccines, the mechanism said. The new flu vaccine could not have come at a better time, with the flu season well under system and sporadic shortages of both the traditional flu vaccine and the flu treatment Tamiflu. "We have received reports that some consumers have found smudge shortages of the vaccine," FDA Commissioner Dr Margaret Hamburg said Monday on her blog on the agency's website.

Wednesday 18 July 2018

Certain Medications Is Not Enough In The US

Certain Medications Is Not Enough In The US.
Four out of five doctors who attend cancer were unqualified to prescribe their medication of choice at least once during a six-month spell because of a drug shortage, according to a new survey. The survey also found that more than 75 percent of oncologists were contrived to make a major change in patient treatment. These changes included altering the regimen of chemotherapy drugs initially prescribed and substituting one of the drugs in a distinct chemotherapy regimen. Such changes might not be well studied, and it might not be perceptive if the substitutions will work as well or be as safe as what the doctor wanted to prescribe, experts say.

And "The drugs we're inasmuch as in shortages are for colon cancer, tit cancer and leukemia," said Dr Keerthi Gogineni, an oncologist who led the team conducting the survey. "These are drugs for pushy but curable cancers. These are our bread-and-butter drugs for shared cancers, and they don't necessarily have substitutes. When we asked people how they adapted to the shortages, they either switched combinations of drugs or switched one antidepressant within a regimen," said Gogineni, of the Abramson Cancer Center and Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

So "They're making the best of a critical situation, but, truly, we don't have a reason of how these substitutions might affect survival outcomes". Results of the survey were published as a line in the Dec 19, 2013 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The measure included more than 200 physicians who routinely prescribe cancer drugs. When substitutions have to be made, it's often a generic narcotize that's unavailable. Sixty percent of doctors surveyed reported having to determine a more expensive brand-name drug to continue treatment in the face of a shortage.

The metamorphosis in cost can be staggering, however. When a generic drug called fluorouracil was unavailable, substituting the brand-name tranquillizer Xeloda was 140 times more expensive than the desired drug, according to the survey. Another privilege is to delay treatment, but again it's not clear what effect waiting might have on an individual patient's cancer. Forty-three percent of oncologists delayed care during a drug shortage, according to the survey.

Complicating matters for doctors is that there are no standard guidelines for making substitutions. Almost 70 percent of the oncologists surveyed said their cancer center or rule had no formal guidelines to aid in their decision-making. Generic chemotherapy drugs have been at jeopardize of shortages since 2006, according to background information accompanying the survey results. As many as 70 percent of numb shortages occur due to a breakdown in production, according to the US Food and Drug Administration.