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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
The high cost of cancer treatments and ongoing drug shortages may prompt cancer patients to buy drugs from illegitimate online pharmacies, research suggests.These online pharmacies sell “unapproved, counterfeit, or otherwise unsafe medicines outside the safeguards followed by licensed pharmacies,” according to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).1 “With the COVID-19 pandemic, more people have gotten comfortable shopping for medicines online but are not aware that 96% of the sites selling prescription medications are not legitimate,” said Sachiko Ozawa, PhD, a health economist and professor at the Eshelman School of Pharmacy of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.2 Online drug purchases increased during the early days of the pandemic as some patients were unable to obtain treatments in person.3 As the pandemic wears on, patients may continue to buy drugs online because supply chain issues have created new shortages of cancer treatments and exacerbated existing shortages.4 A survey of organizations belonging to the Hematology/Oncology Pharmacy Association revealed frequent shortages of oncology drugs in 2020.5 Of 68 organizations surveyed between December 2019 and July 2020, 64% said they had experienced at least 1 oncology drug shortage per month.Even before the pandemic, shortages of cancer drugs motivated patients to buy treatments online. In a study published in 2018, researchers investigated the ease of online access to out-of-stock cancer drugs (bleomycin, carboplatin, carmustine, cisplatin, fluorouracil, gemcitabine, irinotecan, methotrexate, mitomycin, and etoposide) in 2014 and 2016.6 Internet searches revealed that 100% of these medications could be purchased online without a prescription. The number of online sellers offering out-of-stock cancer drugs increased by roughly 15% between 2014 and 2016, and none of the identified vendors were deemed legitimate.More recently, Dr Ozawa and colleagues studied online pharmacies selling imatinib.7 The researchers noted that the high cost of long-term imatinib use may cause patients to seek lower prices online. Of the 44 online pharmacies the researchers studied, 7% were certified, 30% sold imatinib without a prescription, and 48% did not limit the quantity consumers could purchase.“It was also concerning that over 75% of online pharmacies identified did not have access for patients to speak with
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