A vital drug runs low, though it’s a kitchen staple

Doctors lament shortage of sodium bicarbonate.

Hospitals around the coun- try are scrambling to stockpile vials of a critical drug — even postponing operations or putting off chemotherapy treatments — because the country’s only two suppli- ers have run out.

The medicine? Sodium bicarbonate solution. Yes, baking soda.

Sodium bicarbonate is the simplest of drugs, but it is vital for all kinds of patients whose blood has become too acidic.

It is used in open-heart surgery, as an antidote to certain poisons and in some types of chemotherapy.

“As I talk to colleagues around the country, this is really a problem we’re all struggling with right now,” said Mark Sullivan, head of pharmacy operations at Vanderbilt University Hospital and Clinics in Nashville.

Hospitals have been struggling with a dwindling supply of the medicine for months — one of the suppliers, Pfizer, has said that it had a prob- lem with an outside supplier but that the situation worsened a few weeks ago. Pfizer and the other manufacturer, Amphastar, have said they don’t know when the problem will be fixed, but it will not be before June for some forms of the drug, and in August or later for other formulations.

In recent years, hundreds of generic injectable drugs have become scarce, vexing hospital administrators and government officials, who have called on the manufacturers to give better notice when they are about to run short.

Kuldip Patel, associate chief pharmacy officer at Duke University Hospital in North Carolina, said the problem had worsened just after Pfizer went from shipping its generic injectable products from five regional warehouses to one national distribution center, part of a reorganization after its acquisition of the drugmaker Hospira.