FDA Says IV Fluid Shortage Will Last until March 2025
The deficit in supplies was triggered by Hurricane Helene, which caused significant damage to Baxter International’s manufacturing facility in North Carolin.
As we enter the New Year, it is hard to believe that the nation is still reeling from the effects of Hurricane Helene.
It appears that the country is still dealing with a shortage of intravenous (IV) fluids in the US, and the ongoing situation remains a critical issue for hospitals and healthcare providers nationwide.
In late September, the historic storm caused significant damage to Baxter International’s manufacturing facility in North Carolina. The manufacturer was responsible for about 60% of the IV fluids used by American hospitals, equivalent to about 1.5 million bags.
The problem was so severe that the Biden administration invoked the wartime powers of the Defense Production Act to speed the rebuilding of a major American factory of intravenous fluids in mid-October.
While the factory remains offline, the Food and Drug Administration has greenlighted Baxter to import IV fluids from its other plants around the world. Officials say they are also backing plans to airlift more supplies into the U.S.
“It turns out, a huge part of my time has been taken up, including today, on very basic supply chain issues across every commodity that we regulate,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said earlier this month at a meeting of the agency’s science advisers.
Califf warned shortages were likely to worsen in the coming years, as many generic drugmakers are racing to cut costs amid growing threats to supply chains.
The FDA announced Friday that it had declared three more IV fluids in shortage, adding to an ongoing shortage of other IV supplies now worsened by the closed plant.
The importance of IV fluid use in medicine is hard to overstate. They are vital for maintaining proper hydration and restoring electrolyte balance in patients. This is particularly important in cases of severe dehydration.
IV fluids serve as an efficient vehicle for delivering medications directly into the bloodstream, which allows for rapid distribution of drugs throughout the body and enables quick therapeutic effects. The fluids also facilitate blood transfusions.
Now the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced the shortage will last until March.
The FDA announced that IV fluid containers of all sizes have been added to its medical device shortages list, with the shortage expected to persist through March 2025.
The FDA cited an acute increase in demand as the primary factor behind the supply constraint. The shortage affects a wide range of IV containers, which are critical for the administration of fluids and medications in hospital settings.
The announcement comes as hospitals and medical facilities report growing concerns about their ability to meet patient needs due to limited availability of IV products and devices.
Hospitals, such as Onvida Health in rural Yuma, Arizona, monitor their supplies and rationing as needed.
Michael Tracy, an orthopedic surgeon at the hospital said it’s been challenging especially during these winter months.
“Our population tends to double when the winter visitors arrive. So when we shifted from the summer to the winter months we had a much higher population which unfortunately means many more patients in the hospital needing those same fluids,” said Tracy.
Although they’ve been able to get back to doing some elective surgeries, he said it’s all based on their daily supply.
“It does tend to change day to day which products are available and which products are limited. We have to keep a very close eye on our shipments,” Tracy said. “We’ve had to become really good stewards of the limited amount of IV fluids that are available to us.”
He said the hospital has been busy with a bigger population in Yuma during the winter months.
Tracy said emergency visits have not been disrupted, and they’ve been able to meet the needs of patients who need IV fluids the most.
IV Fluid Shortage Likely to Extend Into Early 2025 https://t.co/s9hvJp7Onk
— Chris Harrop (@MedEdit) December 31, 2024
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Comments
Surely another American company can make IV fluids
No one ever thought it was a problem to have one plant supply over 60% of all the IV fluid for the entire United States. No one thought, “Hey, if anything happened to that plant, we will be a world of hurt.” Well, guess what? Something happened and we lost 60% of our IV fluid supply.
How many other potential scenarios are there like this in our country for other critically needed supplies?
Ummm…I think that everything besides the actual farming/ranching and lumber is like that.
Nitrocellulose is another single source item and in my opinion (FWIW) a national security risk which needs to be addressed by (admittedly massive) investment in multiple manufacturing facilities to ensure that a catastrophic incident doesn’t eliminate a significant amount of production.
Same problem as the mostly one supplier source of Baby formula problem that had baby food formula shortages in 2022.
Ask perplexity.ai the following question: “is there something about the healthcare supply industry which encourages monopolies”
Yes. Yes there are several things. We are kind of screwed.
Since the Biden (spit) Administration (spit again) seems to have prioritized the Ukraine over the Carolinas maybe he can ask Zelensky if he can spare some.
The IV shortage is in no small measure the fault of this incompetent b00bs and they cannot leave office soon enough.
A large problem with a leadership team with a doddering old man at the top is near complete lack of competence and thus zero accountability. It won’t improve until noon on the 20th of January.
Centralizing production and cost savings from the economy of scale is all fine and dandy .. until the facility goes offline. This is another example of how allowing this degree of market share, reportedly 60%, makes us vulnerable to disruption. When everything is humming the producer and consumer can theoretically benefit economically but there are very important considerations beyond just that.
In the computing industry, large scale systems tend towards architectures which are centralized. Think big data centers. A tremendous amount of energy is focused on scalability but also redundancy and failover capability. Contractual arrangements almost always include detailed language (Service Level Agreements) that dictate up-time and contingencies for disaster recovery, including financial penalties if the provider cannot meet these commitments. An analogy would be that if a data center in North Carolina got devastated by a hurricane, a well-designed system architecture would have a failover data center in another region of the country, and theoretically the end-users of the system might not even notice a blip of downtime. The customers of the computing systems demand this level of fault-tolerance because they know the systems are ‘mission critical’ to their business. It’s all about ‘business continuity.’
Why don’t the buyers of these medical supplies demand the same of their suppliers?
Wow, some genius thought that having a single source for something vital was a good idea. Must have been a Biden appointee. Nobody else is that goddamn stupid
This problem is due to government policies deliberately encouraging consolidation in all industries.
But especially in medical industry.
Corporatization of medicine, and just in time ordering has resulted in all surgical gloves, and most antibiotics being produced in China.
Corporatization of medicine, and Justin time ordering, has resulted in all surgical gloves, and most antibiotics being produced in China.
I need fluids and medicines are produced in China factories in the little guy because of pharmacy benefit, managers looking only at the bottom line
Let us hope President Trump can sort of policy of re-shoring or production and deregulating new factory production
Medical Supplies and Equipment is the biggest scam and has been for years. IMHO, these companies are just as bad if not worse than big pharma.
Let me give you a couple of examples. When I was a teenager my step-father was a site manager for a construction company that built medical facilities and schools. The electrical outlets for these facilities cost 6 dollars in the early 90’s not the red outlets for generators either just a plain outlet. Now I could go to the hardware store and by the same outlet for 50 cents. The increased cost was because they were “Medical Grade”.
about 15 years ago I was ordering a replacement Monitor/TV for a endoscopy lab where i worked. The 32 inch Medical Grade Monitor I ordered came in and was delivered to me. It was the same 32 inch TV that you could go to walmart and buy for under 5oo dollars at the time. And when I say the same, I mean same box, no indications that it was any different than the Walmart TV. None of the paperwork or packaging even said that it was medical grade. The price was 3200 dollars. Had we not had the proof that we ordered the medical grade monitor from the right place we could have lost certification, been cited on inspections, or even had to close the endoscopy room until we ordered the TV from the right place.
CT machines are sold for about 5 to 6 times their cost to manufacture.
This is all equipment in the medical industry. The reason there isn’t more competition is because these monopolies are so well established (and usually government supported) that if you wanted to make a company to challenge them you would go broke before you ever made your first sale, due to the regulatory costs of just getting started up.
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