13
votes
Blood culture bottle shortage challenges US hospitals, labs
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- Title
- Hospitals, labs, and health departments try to cope with blood culture bottle shortage
- Authors
- Helen Branswell
- Published
- Jul 23 2024
- Word count
- 836 words
BD is a massive manufacturer of culturing supplies. When I was working in labs pretty much all basic culturing tools came from them. They basically wrote the manual on what media to culture with. https://www.scientificlabs.co.uk/handlers/libraryFiles.ashx?filename=Manuals_2_212304_A.pdf
We occasionally would order from a different company from France for a specific product, but the way hospital and university purchasing works creates massive disincentives for new companies. It is always easier to purchase from the company you have the relationship with and who is already in the finance system. You also end up with negotiated discounts. I am not totally surprised that an issue with BD supplies would be hurting many many many institutions. We really rely heavily on only a couple of big corporations for essential medical supplies.
I'm curious about the cause of the shortage, as well as why no other company produces these products.
I don’t have the answer to this particular problem. But my wife works in a pharmacy and we’ve discussed prior medication/supply shortages. A lot of it comes down to consolidation and unintentional consequences of the “free market”. For example, there was a shortage of normal saline - which isn’t complicated to make, but only a few places made it - I think one of them was in Puerto Rico. So when there’s a local issue with the plant or distribution system, it has major repercussions for the country as a whole. The profit motive doesn’t exist for other companies to make the same product, so there’s no pressure for redundancy. It’s very scary when you consider how dependent we are on these supplies. A similar phenomenon happens with medications as a whole - there isn’t easy money to be made researching new antibiotics but there is money is weight loss drugs or hair re-growth. The medical needs of the society and the fiduciary wants of the medical industry don’t line up. Government would ideally step in with regulation to make the systems line up better and be less susceptible to these shortages.
I am also curious