Remember the infant-formula crisis? It's not over

Public attention has largely moved on, but the U.S. supply shortage isn’t over — and the scarcity continues to distress parents and doctors struggling to feed vulnerable infants.

In Memphis, Mark Corkins heads the pediatric gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition practice at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. Earlier in the shortage, which began in earnest after a recall this past spring, Corkins treated children who had been hospitalized because they didn’t have enough of the specialty formulas they needed. When these children were fed other formulas and had negative reactions, they became so dehydrated that they required fluids and nutrients delivered through IVs.

Corkins said he still sees periodic shortages of specialty formulas, which has made caring for patients undergoing intestinal rehabilitation particularly hard. Those children require strict diet management. And “just when you get them adjusted to one formula,” he wrote in an email, “you have to switch again.”