A high school coach who fought to the end against an aggressive cancer to continue training his young players has succumbed to the disease, becoming one of the most recent victims of a major drug shortage in the UNITED STATES.
“I keep asking myself, ‘What if we had gotten cisplatin? Could he have slowed down his cancer? Would he have been able to train even more?” Coach Jeff Bolle’s widow, Connie Bolle, told Today last Monday. It’s always in the back of my mind.”
A few months after the death of her husband, who passed away on December 29 at the age of 60, his wife made it her duty to continue the awareness work started by her partner, by shedding light on the impact of the drug shortage that has been affecting the United States for several months.
Because the coach, who was diagnosed with a rare bile duct cancer in October 2022, might still have been alive today if he had been able to get the last two chemotherapy treatments in his treatment plan.
The man had already undergone surgery and four rounds of chemotherapy when his care was reportedly suddenly interrupted in May 2023 by a shortage of cisplatin, among 14 cancer drugs that were being made difficult to find, NBC News previously reported. ‘last summer.
But as of April 2024, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) website still indicated it was in shortage of 15 oncology agents, according to Today.
“He really cared about other people not getting these chemotherapy drugs. It would still be sad today to learn that people are still faced with this,” lamented Connie Bolle.
But even though cisplatin and carboplatin would still be listed as “in short supply,” patients would receive their medications now, after the country allowed imports and increased production, according to Dr. Mark Fleury, who works in policy development for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action.
“What we are experiencing now is actually the latest in a series of waves of shortages going back a decade. We have many drugs that have never really left shortage and some that go in and out of shortage,” he added to Today.
Nevertheless, he is of the opinion that the underlying problems of this crisis should be tackled, which would have kept the health system “in this constant state of crisis” for too long, he would have insisted.
The problem is that several companies that produce this type of drug “go bankrupt or encounter quality problems” because the profits from their production are not great enough to invest in this research, the FDA commissioner raised. , Dr. Robert Califf, to NBC News in May 2023.
“We need to figure out how to better manage the crisis we find ourselves in,” concluded Mark Fleury, to Today.
