Tech Wants Drug Hotline For Pregnant Women

When I heard that Texas Tech wants to establish a drug hotline for pregnant women, my first thought was of a hotline for women with drug problems. I wondered if another drug hotline was really needed. But it turns out that this is a different kind of drug hotline.

This would be a hotline that pregnant women or nursing mothers could call to find out if the drugs they are required to take might have a harmful effect on their unborn or nursing child. At the present time, there is only one hotline like this, and it is located in Canada.

Texas Tech officials believe there is a need for this in the United States. According to the Amarillo Globe News, "Every year, roughly 4.3 million women get pregnant, and 95 percent take some form of medication while pregnant. An estimated 77 percent will leave the hospital breast feeding."

Many of these women worry about whether the drugs they are required to take will affect their child. Richard Jordan, dean of Texas Tech's School of Medicine in Amarillo, says, "Many times breast feeding is discontinued because a woman is on a medication and she or her provider incorrectly think they can't breast feed."

Assistant Dean Tom Hale is heading up the creation of the call center. He says there's a need for it, and the school has the information needed. All he needs now is the money to establish the hotline and keep it running. The call center would be in Amarillo.

Hale estimates he'll need $200,000 to renovate a campus building for the 15-man call center, and $300,000 a year to keep it running. He hopes he can get the annual operating costs by "charging pharmaceutical companies for data the center will collect from callers." That is because the FDA will soon require "drug companies to create registries to track pregnant women on drugs they market and to compile data on the medication's impact." The information collected by the hotline could be very valuable in compiling this data.

I think this hotline is a great idea, and I hope Tech is able to get it going. It would not only be a great resource for the Panhandle and the state of Texas, but for the entire country. The Canadian hotline generates 100,000 calls a year. With the population of the United States, Tech's Amarillo hotline would probably generate many more calls than that.