Cardiovascular shortages

No. Available means a manufacturer has told the FDA it is shipping that product nationally. Your pharmacy orders from a wholesaler, which may be out, on allocation, or simply may not stock that manufacturer. Always confirm with your pharmacist.

The National Drug Code identifies one product from one manufacturer in one package size. Two tablets with the same name and strength from different manufacturers have different NDCs. Naming the code removes any ambiguity about which product you are asking for.

Rarely. 19 of the 1,580 listings we hold today carry the status “Resolved”, and we show that word when the FDA uses it. But it is not how a shortage usually ends: far more often the listing simply disappears from the database between one day's copy and the next, and we report that as no longer listed by FDA — which is exactly what we observed and no more. We never call a shortage over on our own judgement.

We fetch the entire FDA shortage database once a day and compare it to the previous copy. The feed itself updates roughly every business day. The maximum age of anything shown here is 24 hours from our last check, and the check date is printed on every page.

No, and nobody can do so from public data. There is no lawful public feed of pharmacy shelf inventory. Everything here is national manufacturer reporting. This is the single biggest limitation of the site and we would rather say it plainly than imply otherwise.

Ask whether they can order a specific manufacturer's product, and give them the code. If they cannot, ask whether a different strength that adds up to the same dose is available, then contact your prescriber, since that substitution needs a new prescription and is their call.

For Schedule II medications, most states do not permit transferring an unfilled prescription between pharmacies. In practice that means a new prescription sent to the new pharmacy, which is why knowing where to call before you move the script saves time.

We compare each day's full copy of the database against the previous one, treating every listing as a fact rather than looking it up by code. 30 package codes in today's feed appear on more than one listing, so a comparison keyed on codes alone would invent changes that never happened.

They are the manufacturer's own words, normalised into four buckets: available, limited, unavailable, and unknown. Unknown covers 439 listings today — 420 of them products being discontinued, which the FDA stops reporting availability for — plus any free-text note we will not guess at. Unknown never triggers an alert.

No. This is a mirror of a public federal dataset with the dates and sources shown. Nothing here is a recommendation about your treatment. Never change how you take a medication without talking to your prescriber or pharmacist.