Vital infrastructure you think of power grids or water lines but it's also a

flooded out place that made most of America's IV fluid. I'm David Brancaccio There is a shortage of drip into your arm IV fluid forcing many hospitals around the country to conserve or in some cases postpone operations.

A factory in North Carolina was flooded out during Hurricane

Helene. Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval has more on why the supply of what starts as

a sterile salt and water solution was so vulnerable.

The Baxter International Plant in North Carolina didn't just make IV fluid.

It made roughly two-thirds of all the IV fluid in the country, says Dr. Chris de Rienzo, with the American Hospital Association.

A product like ivy fluids is almost like having water to your house. You need tons, like literal tons of this fluid in America's largest hospitals every day.

The short supply of fluids has had a ripple effect nationwide in some cases prompting

postponed procedures. We've seen these conservation efforts begin and they're

now taken root from coast to coast and border to border.

And making IV fluid is a little more complex than mixing salt and water,

or making masks during a pandemic.

Dr. Lauren Source is with the Society of Critical Care Medicine and works at a hospital in Chicago.

We saw companies transition over to making PPE, which is a much easier transition for companies to make masks and gloves and gowns

than it is to make ivy fluids that need to be sterile and have specific, for lack of a better word,

recipes.

She says, while hospitals are having difficult conversations

about who gets access to limited IV fluids,

with vulnerable critical care patients, there's no ruling out fatal consequences.

If hospitals cannot get their hands on IV fluids to mix the important drugs that need to be given,

then I would imagine that there would be the potential for that.

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