Southside Virginia resident Wendy Oliver’s body might be frail amid her struggle with Lupus — an autoimmune disease that has rendered her disabled — but her spirit is strong as she and her husband navigate accessing her pain medication amid national drug shortages.

“This [disease] is something I have to deal with, but I don’t need to deal with the uncertainty on whether I’m going to be able to acquire my medications,” she said. “That’s a stress that nobody should have to go through.”

With Lupus, a person’s immune system attacks healthy organs and tissues. In Oliver’s case, it has targeted her bones the most. She had to give up a veterinarian technician career and her husband has had to be her main caregiver in recent decades. Oliver sustains her quality of life through a few 4 milligram doses of hydromorphone per day. The drug, commonly marketed as Diluadid, is a type of opioid that at a low dose, plays a key role in managing her pain.

But it’s been increasingly difficult for her to obtain in the past six months. Based near Farmville, the couple has had to place calls and make drives within hours of their home to get her medication.

Stress can also trigger flare ups with her disease, worsening its symptoms. Between the efforts to get medication lately and concerns about potentially igniting withdrawal symptoms should she miss doses, she’s “terrified.”

Frustrated, she reached out to U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Virginia, as well as various federal agencies to relay her concerns.

Kaine, along with U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, might be able to help Oliver and others with new legislation they are both proposing.

They introduced the Protecting Our Essential Medicines Act on Tuesday to help address shortages in the drug supply chain. It would work by requiring the Secretary of Health and Human Services to maintain a list of the country of origin of certain critical drugs marketed in the United States. The agency would work through a task force with other federal agencies to identify drugs for which a shortage could affect people with chronic conditions, as well as those which might be critical for epidemics or pandemics.

The federal agencies that would be directed into a task force are “the ones you would expect,” Kaine said, like HHS, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

However, the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security are also included, even though they are “not the ones you would necessarily see” participating in such an effort, he said.

“[Sen. Cotton] and I are seeing this as more than just a public health thing,” Kaine said.

Kaine said that approach stems from some lessons learned amid the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, where China, as the country of origin, had to prioritize its people over whatever drug or equipment contracts it had abroad. Likewise, when he was previously the governor of Virginia, he recalled how there was a moment of concern about having enough of a drug that alleviates influenza symptoms at a time when the bird flu was looming.

The new bill also builds on a recent related bipartisan and bicameral bill that included U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Prince William. The End Drug Shortages Act aims to improve communications between hospitals, manufacturers and pharmacies.

Kaine used an environmental analogy to further explain that measure.

“We often put river monitoring gauges on rivers and the farther upstream you put them, the sooner you know when there might be a flood downstream,” he said. “It’s really about information sharing early on, so that we can predict when there may be spikes in demand that would require more production.”

On a Virginia-specific note, he believes that pharmaceutical companies clustered in Richmond and Petersburg may have important roles to play in U.S. manufacturing of medicines.

But the new bill he introduced with Cotton hopes to address the challenges through an international lens, with a keen focus on national security and public health.

“If we get the whole federal family around the table to do these listings of drugs — where they come from, which of these drugs would be really deleterious to public health if there were shortages — that can give us information that might lead us to make certain decisions about production,” Kaine said.

This story originally appeared on VirginiaMercury.com.