Story 17 Shortage of Parkinson’s drug Sinemet in 2010

http://www.canadadrugshortage.com/

Quote:
…”On this website we plan to build a resource on Canadian drug shortages by posting patient stories about the impact of hard-to-find or missing medicine, media reports on the issue, and government and industry efforts to track the problem and its possible causes and consequences. We will also link policy and political statements as they emerge. We have added a new page to track lobbying activities of the pharmaceutical industry.

Please email Jacalyn Duffin at duffin.jacalyn1@gmail.com if you have a story to tell about drug shortages; End Quote

Story 17 Shortage of Parkinson’s drug Sinemet in 2010
http://www.canadadrugshortage.com/patient-stories/
March 17, 2012 / Jacalyn Duffin

A man in rural Quebec wrote to explain a shortage of Sinemet, which plagued Canadian, British and other users for 2 or 3 years until mid-2010.
He writes,
The story simply died. We never did find out why there was a shortage, or what was involved.
The largest producer of sinemet is now a single factory in China – supposedly in an earthquake zone – if there happened to be a fire in that factory, a great number of People With Parkinsons around the world could be completely incapacitated without the drug.
There is no back-up plan, anywhere, no reserves of supply, no production equipment kept in mothballs for emergency.
Throughout those 2 or 3 years of shortage, there was virtually no word from Health Canada (other than warnings that sudden withdrawal could cause permenant brain damage); or any other heath departments world-wide; there was virtually no effort or awareness on the part of the myriad Parkinson’s organisations around the world, with their glossy newsletters.
The only places that reacted were a small group in Spain, who solved the shortage there simply by threatening to press criminal charges against individuals at Merck – and the shortage in Spain disappeared over night, because Merck diverted supplies from countries where they would not be put in jail, and in the U.K. a PD organisation got the story out to the public and the House of Commons.
We found out how low we are in the priorities of the empire that grew up around our illness
For more go to this thread at Neuro Talk: http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...Canada&page=15