Page 2 - Mark Ratain News Today

A quality-control crisis at an Indian pharmaceutical factory has left doctors and their patients with impossible choices as cheap, effective, generic cancer drugs go out of stock.

Scores of drugs to treat cancer, cardiovascular disease and other ailments are in shortage, and experts agree the main cause is the underlying weakness of the generic drug industry.

Many generic drugs for cancer and ADHD, blood thinners and antibiotics are in short supply, in part because there is little profit in making them

The US is is abandoning treatable patients, first by not providing reasonably priced insulin, now by ignoring cancer drug shortages.

Scores of drugs to treat cancer, cardiovascular disease and other ailments are in shortage, and experts agree the main cause is the underlying weakness of the generic drug industry.

Scores of drugs to treat cancer, cardiovascular disease and other ailments are in shortage, and experts agree the main cause is the underlying weakness of the generic drug industry.

This article originally appeared on Undark. When chatting at cocktail parties about his job, Mark Ratain, an oncologist and pharmacologist at the University of Chicago, often asks a short riddle: "Your doctor gives you a prescription for a new drug. The pharmacist says, Make sure you take it on an empty stomach, twice a day. What do you think would happen if you took it with food?" Most dont get the answer right. "Nobody would ever say, Well, I could die from an overdose," Ratain says. Advertis...