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A shortage of the common antibiotic amoxicillin continues in the US as an increasing number of children are diagnosed with seasonal illnesses and more parents are forced to go out of work to care for them.
While pharmacies are struggling, due to a persistent shortage that is affecting the FDA warned against Just a few weeks ago, to meet parental demand for amoxicillin, more and more Americans had to stay home from work to care for their sick children.
More than 100,000 Americans missed work last month — an all-time high — because of childcare problems, many of them due to sick children and sick daytime caregivers.
The FDA initially blamed strong demand for the shortfall as cases of respiratory syncytial virus skyrocketed to unusually high numbers alongside seasonal spikes in strep throat, ear infections and other respiratory illnesses.
Infectious disease specialists say a number of factors, most notably a weakened immune system from the pandemic, are contributing to the recent spike in viral infections.
‘Pandemic babies’, who were protected from respiratory pathogens due to measures such as social distancing, are also now getting sick and the relaxation of mask mandates in schools is making it easier for viruses to spread, especially among people with weakened immune systems.
PICTURED: A toddler in the hospital with RSV. An increasing number of children are arriving at the hospital with respiratory symptoms and other illnesses associated with RSV. A national shortage of amoxicillin makes treating the virus more difficult
More sick children have also led to more parents going out of work, a statistic that hurts worker productivity and the financial stability of families that rely on salaries that come from non-sick pay jobs
Amoxicillin – especially liquid amoxicillin – is used to treat infections in children that can develop in addition to RSV. These can include ear infections and throat infections, such as strep
Although initially large pharmaceutical chains such as CVS and Walgreens said they were able to keep up with the increased need for amoxicillin, parents in the US are getting calls and texts that their pharmacies are out of medicine.
Erin Fox, a senior pharmacy director at the University of Utah Health who tracks drug shortages, said “the supplier just wasn’t prepared for” the sudden run on Amoxicillin.
Sonika Patel, a pharmacist at Lo Cost Pharmacy in Savannah, Georgia, said the drug “has been on backorder since October.”
“Then we had a big uptick in bronchitis and RSV and everything, so the demand for it is so high that people can’t keep up with the supply,” she said. WTOC.
Most of the products that are currently in short supply are the powder for oral suspension which is mixed with water in pharmacies to become a liquid version of the medicine given to children.
According to her, the drug will be available again sometime between late November and early December.
Rudy Njam, who runs iPharmacy in Livonia — a city between Detroit and Ann Arbor — says that as an independent pharmacist, he was able to source liquid amoxicillin from multiple suppliers, an option some major pharmacies don’t have.
“Luckily we have a lot of them,” he said. “We have a large stock, but most of the major drugstores are out of stock,” he said recently ABC7 Detroit.
Dr. Ben Spitalnick, a local pediatrician in Savannah, says he’s seeing more respiratory infections in children right now than in the past five years.
Amoxicillin is the most commonly used antibiotic to treat conditions such as strep throat and bronchitis in children. It does not treat RSV directly, but is used for infections that often co-occur with the virus, such as ear infections.
“It gets the job done without overtreating, without putting a child on something stronger than they need to be so they don’t develop resistance,” Spitalnick said. However, “other options are available,” he said.
A New York doctor said many children come to the hospital with more than one virus attacking their immune system.
He believes the number of children hospitalized with RSV this year will exceed about 60,000 in a normal year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A mother talks about the nightmare she encountered in the ER with her son after she couldn’t get amoxicillin for a strep throat he had
The reality of the shortage means parents will have to spend hours on the phone with local pharmacies for at least the next few weeks chasing down doses of the drug. Although some providers expect the end of the shortage to come later this month
The reality of the shortage means parents will have to spend hours on the phone with local pharmacies for at least the next few weeks chasing down doses of the drug.
One parent wrote that her son tested positive for strep but couldn’t get amoxicillin at CVS or Walgreens. The child’s condition worsened and was eventually admitted to the hospital, where streptococcal pneumonia and RSV were diagnosed in addition to streptococcal pneumonia.
The mother, Marie Rojas, said children were airlifted because there were so few beds available in children’s ICUs in the Chicagoland area.
Stacey Marie Abney told DailyMail.com that she drove to four different pharmacies in her Kansas City, Missouri area looking for the amoxicillin her daughter needed.
She said her husband, who was in Dallas at the time, also had trouble finding the drug when he went to see if there were any local pharmacies. He planned to give it to his family overnight if they couldn’t find one.
Some parents are forced to spend hours on the phone changing the prescription given to their child to make it feasible.
A mother of a seven-year-old in the Detroit, Michigan area said her son had been given amoxicillin to treat a serious ear infection. But she soon got a call from her local CVS that they were out of antibiotics.
After hours of back and forth with her son’s doctor, she managed to get the prescription changed so that a local pharmacy could fill it, but said it was difficult to “get the panic feeling because my child needs your medication,” which is not available .
The shortfall also has a financial impact on parents who are out of work with paid sick leave.
The record number of Americans staying home last month is higher than during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That says Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG Washington Post that having “sick kids at the same time” as a childcare crisis means “there’s just no room for maneuver.”
‘People fall between two stools. It means missed paychecks, disruptions at home and staff shortages that undermine productivity growth and drive up costs at a time when we’re already worried about those things,” she said.
According to federal data, worker productivity fell at the sharpest rate on record during the first half of this year