DES MOINES, Iowa — It's the words no one wants to hear. But now, when patients are told "you have cancer", there's a very real chance doctors have more frightening news to share.
"There is no comfort in telling a patient and their family that their child has cancer or that they have cancer, and then the follow-up sentence is, 'We don't know if we have enough supply to treat you at this time,'" said Blank Children's Hospital Vice President & Medical Director Dr. Wendy Woods.
Woods says a shortage of chemo drugs is impacting all types of cancer patients of all ages.
"We are experiencing unprecedented shortages in chemotherapy drugs that have never been an issue before."
She adds in the past, there would be periodic shortages of a certain drug but that would be remedied by the manufacturer in a relatively short amount of time.
"Now we're seeing multiple drugs and it continues," Woods added. "We continue to see news notices from the FDA, from the manufacturers, about impending shortages. And they're not corrected in the timeframe that we're used to seeing them corrected."
In some cases the manufacturer stopped production altogether, according to Woods, while other times companies are claiming the delay is due to supply chain and production hiccups.
"Many patients are being put on a wait list too for sites to receive their cancer therapies," said Woods. "In the pediatric world, it's affecting our clinical trials and affecting enrollment which will ultimately lead to not the improvement in outcomes that we want to see. It will affect outcomes for those patients who are not able to obtain the drugs that they need to."
It's a devastating scenario for patients and their doctors to face, with no clear picture of when or how this shortage will end.
"The honest truth is, we know that it will impact survival overall, but no one knows how it's going to impact the survival for one single patient."