Persistent shortages of popular drugs are affecting millions of patients worldwide. What lies behind it?

When the end of the month rolls around, Donia Youssef, a 46-year-old children's book writer based in Essex, UK, starts to worry. It is when she calls her local pharmacy to fill her prescription for ADHD medication, but increasingly she gets an answer she dreads: that the drug is out of stock.

"It has been an uphill battle trying to secure it," says Youssef, who has been taking Elvanse for her Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) for six years. "This uncertainty is incredibly stressful and affects my ability to function daily."

Not only do straightforward tasks become daunting when Youssef doesn't have access to her medication, but the financial strain of potentially needing to pay out-of-pocket for alternative treatments, which are only sometimes covered by insurance, adds to her worries. "It's exhausting and disheartening," says Youssef.

Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of patients like Youssef are struggling to access their medication because of ongoing, unprecedented drug shortages around the world. Medications for ADHD, cancer treatments, statins, opioid painkillers, anaesthetics and antibiotics have had persistent or recurring shortages in recent years. Popular weight-loss drugs such as Mounjaro, Wegovy and Ozempic have experienced rapidly rising demand as their use has become popular alongside sudden increases in price, leaving many of those who need the drugs to manage conditions such as type 2 diabetes struggling.

In some cases, such shortages have proven lethal. In 2022, two-year-old Ava Grace Hodgkinson died of sepsis after a pharmacist couldn't amend a prescription for out-of-stock antibiotics. The case has led to policy discussions of how to better handle drug shortages in future.

Doctors and pharmaceutical experts have raised growing concerns about the shortages in recent months. The American Medical Association has reiterated its concern that drug shortages are an "urgent public health crisis" and a threat to national security.

But while government agencies, pharmaceutical companies and policy makers have been trying to find ways to tackle the factors behind the shortages, some speculate the scarcity will get worse, at least over the next couple of years, before it improves.

But for the patients who bear the brunt of these shortages, it means coping with worsening symptoms, finding other ways of managing their conditions, or taking less than they should to stretch their medication further. Others are paying over the odds or stockpiling drugs when they do become available.

The number of drugs facing shortages has recently begun falling. As of the end of September 2025 there were 214 active drug shortages in the US, the lowest number since early 2018, according to data compiled by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), an association representing 60,000 pharmacy professionals in the US. Shortages reached a peak in the first quarter of 2024 when the number reached a record high of 323. Yet many important medicines such as lorazepam, which is used to treat anxiety, and the steroid triamcinolone remain hard to come by, affecting "large numbers of patients", according to the ASHP. It says patients with chronic pain are also affected by shortages of oral opioids.

Elsewhere in the world there is a similar picture. In the UK, there were 135 drugs in short supply as of 20 October 2025. But a recent parliamentary report highlighted that medicine supplies were creating "severe" pressure in the health system and a separate report by MPs in July........

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