Another antibiotic crisis: fragile supply leads to shortages
TRT World reports on the fragile antibiotic supply chains that are dependent on just a few big suppliers, following the whitepaper published by the Access to Medicine Foundation.
The whitepaper ‘Shortages, stockouts and scarcity: the issues facing the security of antibiotic supply and the role for pharmaceutical companies’ explores the underlying systemic factors that cause antibiotic shortages, and identifies how governments, regulators, the pharmaceutical industry and others can fix the antibiotic market.
"Things are getting worse because the market is not fixing the problem, despite the expansion in the need for such specialist antibiotics," said Access to Medicine Founadtion Executive Director Jayasree Iyer.
The article highlights the shortages of products like piperacillin-tazobactam which has been in tight supply since a 2016 explosion at a Chinese pharmaceutical ingredients factory, and benzathine penicillin G (BPG), which faces shortages in at least 39 countries, including Germany and Brazil.