Beyond the growing resistance to current antibiotics, another issue around antibiotics is their availability: From 2001 to 2013, 148 antibiotics were on shortage, with 26 drugs still on shortage as of December 2013, according to a recent study in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
"We found a tremendous number of drugs that are used to treat life-threatening infections that just were no available," Larissa May, MD, one of the study's authors, said. "There are implications that patients may not do as well clinically or potentially even die because these agents are not available."
Researchers analyzed data from the University of Utah Drug Information Service, a national database of drug shortages. Of the 148 drugs that were on shortage at some point from 2001 to 2013, 46 percent were antibiotics used to treat high-risk pathogens, including Clostridium difficile, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, among others.
Additionally, 22 percent of the antibiotics experienced multiple shortages with a median duration of more than six months.
A shortage is defined by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as situations where the total supply of all versions of a drug product regulated by the FDA is inadequate to meet the projected demand.
"This is a big problem, one that we don't really have a strategy to deal with," said Dr. May. "There are some significant implications for patient care that are very disturbing and are likely to become more significant unless we take steps to mitigate them."
The authors suggested some ways to mitigate the effect of shortages on patient care, such as earlier reporting of shortages by manufacturers and improved communication between pharmacists and clinicians.