The Conversation - The drug industry's 'generic' problem

Supplies of drugs that are used to treat pain, infections and other conditions are at risk after a tornado tore through a Pfizer manufacturing site in North Carolina last week.

But for hospitals, pharmacies and millions of patients, drug shortages are nothing new. And in fact, they’ve been going on for years, with hundreds of treatments in extremely short supply, writes Geoffrey Joyce, a health economist at the University of Southern California who has studied the pharmaceutical industry for the past 15 years. The key difference is that most of these shortages are in decades-old generic drugs, not the more profitable brand-name medications that Pfizer produces.

“While costly brand-name drugs often yield high profits to manufacturers, there’s relatively little money to be made in supplying the market with low-cost generics, no matter how vital they may be to patients’ health,” Joyce explains. “This often results in low profit margins and can lead to cost-cutting measures that can compromise quality and threaten supply.”

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