Sunday, November 4, 2012

Meningitis outbreak puts spotlight on pharmacies that make medicines from scratch

By James T. Mulder, The Post-Standard
on November 04, 2012 at 9:00 AM, updated November 04, 2012 at 9:44 AM


Syracuse, N.Y. -- In the pharmacy at the back of Vernak Farms Country Store in Skaneateles, a technician wearing a hairnet, gloves, mask and lab coat uses a machine to blend a creamy ointment that looks like icing for a cake. Patients will rub the mixture into their skin to relieve pain.
Another technician nearby uses a glass mortar and pestle to mix white powder and other ingredients to make “rectal rockets,” special suppositories for hemorrhoid sufferers.
Those items and some other medicines produced at the pharmacy can take hours to make from scratch.
“It’s kind of like an art form,” says Charlene Vernak, the pharmacist in charge, who co-owns the store near the hamlet of Borodino with her husband, Christopher Vernak, who runs the non-pharmacy part of the store.
Charlene Vernak operates a compounding pharmacy, a type of specialty drugstore relatively unknown until a deadly national outbreak of meningitis was recently linked to drugs made by a compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts. Compounding pharmacies make customized medicine for patients with unique health needs that cannot be treated with the mass-produced drugs that regular pharmacies offer.
She and other compounding pharmacists say their small pharmacies have nothing in common with the operation in Massachusetts that was preparing drugs for national distribution and functioning more like a big manufacturer than a pharmacy.

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