One of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s top priorities is to ensure that Americans have access to safe and effective medicines. Sometimes, for a number of reasons, shortagesof certain medicines occur and the FDA works immediately with our public health partners and industry to minimize their impact on patients and restore the availability of these drugs. A shortage of just one critical drug can have a major impact on a patient’s health, which underscores why government and industry need to act quickly to prevent future shortages.
Despite public- and private-sector efforts to prevent and mitigate drug shortages, they continue to occur and persist. So, at the request of Congress last year, the FDA convened an inter-agency Drug Shortages Task Force to study the problem, determine the root causes of drug shortages, and make recommendations for enduring solutions. This effort was designed to help address the number of drug shortages that we continue to experience, which place a serious burden on patients and providers who need access to these medically necessary products.
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