IV Bag Shortage A Wake-Up Call For San Diego Hospitals
"I don't think it was clear to many of us that our supply was this vulnerable," said Dr. Angela Scioscia, chief medical officer of UC San Diego Health.
KPBS:
San Diego Hospitals Grappling With Shortage Of IV Bags
A nationwide shortage of small IV bags has forced hospitals in San Diego to come up with other options. The disruption was caused by the September hurricane that devastated Puerto Rico. (Goldberg, 11/27)
In other news from across the state —
The Ventura County Star:
Port Hueneme Firm Farms Limpets For Medicine
For now, the snail-like mollusk lives in one of the 20 large tanks in an expanding Stellar Biotechnologies complex at the Port of Hueneme. The 18-year-old publicly traded company raises the limpets and extracts a protein in its blood, keyhole limpet hemocyanin, in a process designed not to harm the animal. The KLH protein is sold to companies researching and developing vaccines and other drugs. ...Concerns about the continued availability of the limpet’s protein to pharmaceutical companies pushed [Frank] Oakes and his wife, Dorothy, to start Stellar in the late 1990s on land once owned by the Navy. He said the standard practice before Stellar came along was to harvest the animals from the ocean, kill them and take their blood for the protein. “It was exploitation of a very limited California resource,” he said. (Kisken, 11/25)
Modesto Bee:
Stanislaus County Planners Concerned About The Safety Risks, Adverse Impacts Of Legalized Pot
The statewide initiative to legalize pot in California passed by a comfortable margin a year ago. But that same initiative allows local jurisdictions to control the industry and even ban commercial marijuana within their boundaries. (Carlson, 11/25)