[Bob Dawson]

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

[lindylanka]

Hi Bob, further to your Sinemet story, I am now getting my MSD branded Sinemet in plain pharmacy supplied boxes (they previously came in MSD branded boxes). They are still the yellow oval tablets, 100/25's. The boxes contain leaflets dated 03.09.3009, stating the medicine is manufactured by MSD, Italia S.P.A., Via Emilia, 21-27100 Pavia, Italy, procured from within the EU by Neccessity Supplies Ltd and repackaged by License holder Primecrown Ltd, Middlesex, UB8 2RZ. Despite the date on the leaflet, this is not what it used to say in 2009.

The leaflet still does not really say where they are manufactured, could be Italy or China. Very unclear. Other recent supplies have come via Franceand Spain, and the clips have had various packing. The ones described above are hard and break crisply. They have a long expiry date of 01.09.2018. Some of the others have been crumbly. They have had short dates, the latest being 2013.

There is a qualitative difference between the hard and the crumbly tablets.

I am glad that Sinemet has been logged as story 17 by Jacalyn. In terms of medication security I think we are no closer to an ideal situation than in 2010, and perhaps are further away, even though supplies are at the moment fairly consistent. Every so often a shortage story crops up in another different country. In some ways things are more muddy now. We have no real way of tracking what is happening elsewhere and knowing whether the more recent shortages are medication shortages or problems in the supply chain. Certainly here in the UK changes to procurement as the NHS becomes less cohesive are likely, and medications could change hands more times en route to the patient.

Many thanks for keeping this information out there.
Lindy