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Jay Cuetara: I was affected by the drug -- critical drug
shortage myself.
One of my chemo drugs was not available during my sixth cycle
of chemotherapy treatment in August, and as a result of that,
my chemotherapy was delayed by a week.
I think it's important for people to understand about the
critical drug shortage, that at least for cancer patients,
not having a specific chemo cocktail available to you can
literally mean the difference between curing your cancer or not.
The Executive Order that President Obama signed today
is going to help in two ways.
It's going to increase the number of FDA professionals
that are working on this particular situation.
The folks that have been doing it right now have been working
diligently, but they need more help.
And then secondly, asking the -- directing the generic
pharmaceutical companies who are producing these drugs to
communicate proactively with the FDA in anticipation of drug
shortages is going to allow the FDA then to sort of mitigate
that problem, work with other manufacturers to go ahead and
prevent the shortage from actually occurring.
Again, in the particular case of cancer patients, we can't wait,
because they can't wait for the chemo cocktails.
I mean they -- we need the drugs to be able to beat the cancer
and to be able in many cases cure the cancer,
and if not cure the cancer, hopefully prolong life in a
good quality manner.
So we can't wait for these drugs to be back in high supply.