The Texas State Board of Pharmacy is now working with the FDA and immediately sending inspectors to the Cedar Park pharmacy, according to the board's executive director.

Cedar Park compounding pharmacy recalls medications

People at two Corpus Christi hospitals got sick

Updated: Tuesday, 13 Aug 2013, 6:45 PM CDT
Published : Tuesday, 13 Aug 2013, 6:45 PM CDT

• Leslie Rhode

CEDAR PARK, Texas (KXAN) - A Central Texas compounding pharmacy says some of its medication could be tainted.

Specialty Compounding in Cedar Park ships sterile medication made in Central Texas to hospitals and doctors in states all over the country. Now they've voluntarily recalled all unexpired sterile medication sent out since May 9 of this year.

The alert came when 15 people in two Corpus Christi hospitals got bacterial infections possibly from a contaminated drug -- calcium gluconate -- that came from Specialty Compounding.

The Texas State Board of Pharmacy is now working with the FDA and immediately sending inspectors to the Cedar Park pharmacy, according to the board's executive director.

Whether compounding drugs is safe or not is again in question.

"I would hope so," said Gay Dodson, the executive director of the Texas State Board of Pharmacy. "We have special rules.  We require extensive rules for the pharmacists who are doing it."

The State Board of Pharmacy is putting extra emphasis on inspecting the more than 100 high risk compoundingpharmacies in Texas; those that make sterile drugs injected straight into the bloodstream.

Lawmakers just approved money for the board to hire five more pharmacy inspectors, making a total of 12 to watch over all pharmacies in Texas.

"Our goal is to inspect the high risk ones at least every 6 months. To get in there and do something to make sure they are in compliance."

Specialty Compounding did not respond to calls from KXAN about the recall, did release a statement over the weekend saying: "We deeply regret the impact this recall has on our patients and the hospitals that we serve, but patient safety must always be our first concern."

Currently there is a national push to regulate compounding pharmacies closer as well. A bill in the U.S. Senate would give the FDA and state agencies more regulatory authority over compounding pharmacies. All of this extra precaution started after a medical scare last fall when a compounding pharmacy in New England distributed contaminated medication.

The Centers For Disease Control say meningitis fungi in those medications are connected to 63 deaths, while hundreds more contracted the illness from the back pain medication.

In-Depth: Compounding Pharmacies 
The compounding pharmacy industry has grown rapidly over the last few years. Between 2007 and 2012, the industry saw about 5.5 percent growth each year according to researcher IBIS. Today it is a $2 billion industry thanks in part to America's aging population needing medications, and shortages of some medications.

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