Early onset of flu season, rise in number of cases lead to shortage of children’s medicine in US

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“Major pharmacies CVS, and Walgreens are limiting sales of child pain and fever medication amid high demand. This will get worse. Pharmacies are running low on such meds across the US and Canada and parts of Europe. Even China has a shortage,” epidemiologist and health economist Dr Eric Feigl-Ding wrote on Twitter.

 

American healthcare company CVS Health has imposed a two-product limit on all children’s pain relief products bought online or through its pharmacies. Similarly, pharmacy store chain Walgreens has also limited customers from buying more than six children’s over-the-counter fever-reducing products online. However, for Walgreens the limit does not apply in stores, Associated Press reported.

At the same time, Johnson & Johnson said it did not experience widespread shortages of the paediatric drug Tylenol even though the drugmaker said the product may be “less readily available” at some stores.

According to the US Food and Drug Administration, the prescription antibiotic amoxicillin is also in short supply due to increased demand.

The situation in the US is similar to the situation with toilet paper at the beginning of the (COVID-19) pandemic, Associated Press quoted Dr Shannon Dillon, a paediatrician at Riley Children’s Health in Indianapolis, as saying. “You just have to look in the right place at the right time,” Dillon added.

Meanwhile, millions of people in China are struggling to find treatment amid record Covid infections due to medicine shortages.

People from Hong Kong and Taiwan are buying vast quantities of Ibuprofen and Paxlovid and shipping them to mainland China where there is high demand for the drugs.

In China, where the Covid restrictions were recently lifted, there is a huge demand for fever-reducing drugs such as Ibuprofen, whose price has quadrupled, and the antiviral drug Paxlovid, which was sold out within hours.

One reason for the shortage of fever medicine in China could be the government’s strict sale of cold and flu medication under its “zero-Covid” policy. As part of the policy, buyers had to register their names to get over-the-counter drugs. This was done to prevent residents from using these drugs to reduce fevers and avoid detection.

If the government eased the restrictions for about two months before lifting them completely, people would have been able to prepare for such situations and the rush would not have happened, The New York Times quoted a pharmacist working at a public hospital in Beijing as saying.