Whats up with Alesse? (shortage?)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I think (hope) this is in the right forum. Of course I don’t have any proof of any of this other than a frantic evening of messaging with my 23 year old former tenant. Seems she is unable to locate any Alesse (birth control pill manufactured by Wyeth and heavily marketed to teens/ young women) in the Greater Toronto Area at all. She says the pharmacies say (so yes this is third hand, and might be all wrong) that the manufacturer hasn’t shipped any in months.

Has anyone heard of a recall? The www.Alesse.ca site requires a DIN to enter the site. The US site is just redirected to Wyeth.

Again, its just my morbid curiosity…why have shipments stopped? Does anyone know.

(Please lets not argue the moral/ethical/health considerations of oral contraceptives marketed to teens. Im just curious. Wondering if any Dopers out there know whats going on?)

2

Oops, I just searched “Alesse Shortage” Found all the links. I guess a “problem in a production plant”. Im still curious though.

3

Hey, I’ve been having the same trouble out west here in Van-- everything in the right dosage is totally out (not Alleve but another light-dosage pill-- sounds like it’s across the board). First doctor’s appointment I can get to get switched to something that’s available is next Friday. Feck. (34 years old–nothing about teens here). Annoying situation.

4

Alleve would probably qualify as an extremely light-dosage pill.

5

Yeah, I went in to get my yearly refill and the pharm at school only had generic. Dammit.

6

That happened to me, with DepoProvera, in Montreal, a few years ago.

I was Not Happy.

7

Here’s some more bad news. I work at Planned Parenthood. We’ve been out of Alesse for… six months? Maybe more. Wyeth just stopped shipping it to us with no real explanation. At least with Mircette we knew they were discontinuing it and could prepare/stockpile/find replacement pills to add to the formulary. With Alesse they just stopped shipping it to us, and we started rationing them out fewer and fewer packs at a time trying to stretch the supply until we were re-stocked, but eventually had to switch all our Alesse patients over to another low-dose, monophasic OC… so your third-hand information has now been at least partially corroborated.
It is pretty infuriating though, at one time we had four or five different low-dose monophasics to choose from and it was a pretty sure bet we’d find a pill that just about anyone loved. Now we’re really, really limited and our two most popular pills are gone.

8

Oh, so to directly answer your question, we don’t know why. The suppliers were just as puzzled as anyone and kept telling us they’d ship “eventually” but didn’t really know when they’d have it, either. They weren’t recalled, just weren’t supplied.

9

Crap I hope I don’t have to change pills. :frowning: I’ve been on Alesse for two years and I really like it.

10

You and everyone else :frowning: . You shoulda heard the riot that happened when we had to tell people Mircette was being pulled off the market by Organon.