The count of infected patients has been going up daily. And yesterday’s headlines screeched that the drug recall related to the fungal meningitis outbreak could rival the Tylenol scare of the 1980s. The Dallas County HHS (Health and Human Services) Director, Zach Thompson, was quoted in Dallas media as saying we’re “talking about probably the largest recall we have seen in recent times in the United States.” (Source: DFW CBS 11, 10/16/12)
This large recall is the approximately 70 pages long list of recalled drugs manufactured by the NECC (New England Compounding Center), the company that made the contaminated medications linked with the deadly meningitis outbreak in the United States.
Originally, it was an injectable steroid medication used to mitigate lower back pain that was linked to the outbreak. But federal health officials have since become aware of a cardiac medication and another epidural medication that appear contaminated with fungus.
Federal Agents Raid the NECC Compounding Pharmacy; Better Late than Never
Yesterday, federal agents raided the Framingham, MA home of the NECC compounding pharmacy that has been fingered as the source of the deadly meningitis outbreak. Agents confiscated medications and records and sealed off the manufacturing facility with yellow police tape. (Source: Erin Smith, Boston Herald, 10/16/12)
Federal and state officials are investigating the NECC not just to determine the source of the fungal contamination, but because the compounding pharmacy was mass-producing (or “manufacturing” which it cannot legally do) tens of thousands of doses of drugs and soliciting physicians to distribute them, without requiring patient prescriptions for each dose as is legally required. Compounding pharmacies like the NECC play a very limited role in the pharmaceutical world, legally supplying only custom-mixed prescriptions filled for individual patients and their unique drug needs.
Our Texas drug injury lawyers find it difficult to believe that politicians and state and federal officials were unaware that compounding pharmacies had begun to exceed this role in order to take advantage of mass drug shortages produced by other drug recalls, among other things. In any case, the deadly fungal meningitis outbreak has finally raised some questions among politicians (it’s an election year, after all) and drug regulators about how compounding pharmacies operate.
Continued in Part 2.