Ohio reports 2 more cases in meningitis outbreak

Asso­ci­ated Press

DAYTON — Ohio reported two more ill­nesses in a deadly fun­gal menin­gi­tis out­break linked to a Mass­a­chu­setts com­pound­ing com­pany, bring­ing the state’s total to 13 cases as it cracks down on phar­ma­cies that custom-mix prescriptions.

Cases involv­ing a 39-year-old Cler­mont County man and a 56-year-old War­ren County woman were added to those pre­vi­ously reported in Craw­ford, Franklin, Hamil­ton, Mar­ion and Mor­row coun­ties, the Ohio Depart­ment of Health said Mon­day. Fed­eral offi­cials have listed 25 deaths and more than 330 ill­nesses in the out­break linked to back injec­tions made by a spe­cialty pharmacy.

Jesse L. Wim­berly, phar­macy inspec­tor for the Ohio State Board of Phar­macy, said Ohio has 17 spe­cially des­ig­nated com­pound­ing phar­ma­cies statewide. They’re usu­ally inspected at least once every three years, though inspec­tors will go more often if there are com­plaints or reported violations.

“Now we’re going to every one of these phar­ma­cies that are des­ig­nated for com­pound­ing,” Wim­berly told the Day­ton Daily News for a story pub­lished Monday.

Wim­berly said the state now requires phar­ma­cies to spec­ify how much of their busi­ness is strictly retail sales and how much is mix­ing up cus­tom prepa­ra­tions. And they have to be able to demon­strate that they meet clean­li­ness stan­dards and show that their prod­ucts are being pre­pared for spe­cific patients — not mixed up in advance and set aside to fill future orders.

“The issue we’re hav­ing now is, are you doing patient-specific com­pound­ing,” Wim­berly said. “We don’t do man­u­fac­tur­ing. We do com­pound­ing for spe­cific patients. We check the records and make sure that they’re in com­pli­ance so that when you get a pre­scrip­tion it’s for a spe­cific per­son and you’re com­pound­ing that pre­scrip­tion for that per­son and giv­ing that pre­scrip­tion to that person.”

Not being able to link pre­scrip­tions to spe­cific patients is one of the issues offi­cials are find­ing in the inves­ti­ga­tion of the New Eng­land Com­pound­ing Cen­ter in Fram­ing­ham, Mass., he said.

Since news broke of the prob­lems at the Mass­a­chu­setts phar­macy, Ohio has ordered the clo­sure of a com­pound­ing phar­macy in Piqua, north of Day­ton. On Oct. 19, the state ordered JAH Phar­ma­cies Inc. to close after issu­ing 29 cita­tions, most for fail­ure to meet clean­li­ness stan­dards or for hav­ing out­dated drug stock.

In Mass­a­chu­setts, state phar­macy reg­u­la­tors started to con­duct sur­prise inspec­tions at com­pound­ing phar­ma­cies last week. State offi­cials announced over the week­end they had shut down one such phar­macy over steril­ity concerns.

Posted by AP News on Oct 29 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.