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What Next TBD: The Never-Ending Cancer Drug Shortage

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Slate Podcasts

News, Business, Society & Culture

41.1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2023

⏱️ 34 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A shortage of basic chemotherapy drugs to treat cancer is jeopardizing the care of hundreds of thousands of patients. The drugs aren’t expensive, or patented—so where are they? Guest: Ed Yong, science journalist at The Atlantic. Host: Lizzie O'Leary If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on What Next TBD. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey there, Interwebs.

0:09.0

Hope everyone's having a good night, right?

0:10.7

Oh my eyes look real dark in this lighting.

0:13.2

That's rad.

0:14.2

This is a TikTok from a man named Chuck Jackson.

0:16.8

His handle is Chuck Fight's Cancer, where he chronicles his treatment for squamous cell

0:21.3

carcinoma.

0:22.9

The thing I want to talk about a little bit is this, uh, this carbo plan and other chemo

0:28.3

drug, uh, shortage that's out there.

0:31.1

Try to do a little research on this and, and I can't really find much on there other

0:34.5

than there's been more than 40 states in the US so far that have, uh, run into this

0:39.0

shortage.

0:40.0

So Jackson's TikTok is from the end of May.

0:42.6

And since then, the shortages of cancer drugs, basic chemotherapy drugs have gotten so

0:48.4

bad that they're threatening the care of hundreds of thousands of patients across the

0:52.6

country.

0:53.6

So currently around 14 different chemotherapy drugs are in shortage.

1:01.0

That's Ed Young, a science writer for the Atlantic.

1:03.8

And some of those include things like cisplatin, carboplatin and methotrexate, which are really

1:10.0

frontline drugs.

1:12.3

These are generic drugs, pretty basic ones, and they are the foundations of chemotherapy

1:17.5

from more than a dozen kinds of cancer.

...

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