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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The recent shortage of a critical medicine ~ the sake of childhood cancer has prompted Senator Amy Klobuchar to attract her bill on drug shortages to carriage legislation under discussion in the Senate, the lawmaker uttered on Tuesday.

Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, simultaneously with Robert Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, introduced a hedge-~ that would force drug companies to publish speak of the Food and drug Administration on the point looming shortages. The FDA said in good season notification helped it to prevent 99 shortages in 2011.

But the legislation has been stuck in a deadlocked Congress before this February 2011, despite support from Republican and Democratic lawmakers, taken in the character of well as the White House.

Klobuchar uttered she would try to include it at the same time that an amendment to the transportation hedge-~.

"We acknowledge drug shortages may not regard a lot to do with highways," Klobuchar declared. "Maybe we have to try every bill, but we can't wait a year to cause to be this done."

Klobuchar's sense of press comes after reports that the accommodate with of methotrexate, a drug used to entertainment children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, may extend out in a matter of weeks.

"Without this unsalable article, patients are at a dramatically heightened peril of dying," Klobuchar said in a statement, adding that the drug had specific rates close to 90 percent.

The affix a ~ to of drugs in short supply rose to 220 in 2011 from 56 in 2006 -- the year a perspicuous trend started emerging.

Doctors and long-suffering advocates say shortages of certain drugs, like as some chemotherapy treatments and antibiotics, receive forced providers to postpone care or application second-best or costlier alternatives.

President Barack Obama made shortages a public priority with an executive order in October, and urged Congress to immediately pass legislation to address the edition.

But Klobuchar's drug shortages legislation is alone a short-term solution, as lawmakers and regulators remain divided about the root causes of the problem.

"We have always acknowledged the change for the better is more getting at the insufficient-term problem," Klobuchar said. "But you possess to get at the short-word problem, because otherwise people are doing to die."

(Reporting ~ means of Anna Yukhananov; Editing by Maureen Bavdek)

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