Pharmacy, Meningitis Outbreak | featured news

A grand jury is investigating the compounding pharmacy at the heart of a deadly meningitis outbreak, the Boston Globe reported on Saturday.

Pharmacy compounding has come under a spotlight in recent months, after a center produced pain medicine contaminated with fungus that caused a national meningitis outbreak.

...These recent quality lapses at big drug companies show that contamination and shoddy practices extend well beyond the loosely regulated compounding pharmacies that have attracted attention because of their link to an outbreak of meningitis... [S]everal industry observers and former plant employees said that the recent quality issues were troubling and that manufacturers had been reluctant to fix problems because stopping production was simply too costly in a business where profits were driven by volume.

The House of Representatives on Friday widened its investigation into the deadly meningitis outbreak to include the role health regulators played in monitoring the pharmacy that produced steroid treatments suspected of causing the crisis.