Almost everyone now must have heard about the New England Compounding Pharmacy tragedy that has been unfolding over the past month. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (CDC) numbers the present death toll at 28 and total reported cases at 377 from 19 states. Untold thousands of patients may have been injected with contaminated medicines. The New York Times has called this situation “one of the worst public health drug disasters since the 1930s.” 

Already there are more calls for stricter regulations and controls for compounded medicines that enter interstate commerce. The New York Times reported on November 2, 2012, that Representative Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) will be introducing a bill to oversee compounding pharmacies with wide-scale operations be regulated as “manufacturers” by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Calls for greater regulation of compounding pharmacies are not new; the FDA has been attempting greater control for at least the last 20 years.

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