Some medicines are being held up by the wholesalers in Bulgaria, and patients can not find them when needed, the Health Ministry announced Monday.
Medications for asthma and COPD, epilepsy, diabetes, cancer, anticoagulants, immunosuppressants and muscle relaxants are some medicines that patients are struggling to find.
“I can’t tell you why this happens. Our goal is to find the causes and eliminate them. There will be sanctions,” Deputy Minister of Health Alexander Zlatanov commented after the first meeting of the Special Council for the Control of Drug Supply – a body set up by the health minister that includes representatives of the health authorities, the regulator, and the participants in the drug supply chain.
Zlatanov explained that the purpose of the special council is to minimise the risk of missing medicines on the market through additional imports, regulation, and higher control.
Around a dozen different drugs are believed to be missing from shelves, but the number could be higher as planned inspections of wholesalers and pharmacies are incomplete.
Next week the special council will discuss the formula for including drugs on a list prohibited for export.
Some medicines that are hard to find or absent from the Bulgarian market are exported from the country due to flaws in the functioning of the electronic system for tracking the shortage of medicines.
Deyan Denev, executive director of the Association of Research-based Pharmaceutical Manufacturers in Bulgaria (ARPharM), explained that the pan-European The Medicines Verification System, which has been operating since 2019 and aims to prevent counterfeit products from entering the market, can help track the availability of medicines in the country.
At the moment, however, the system is not fully functioning in Bulgaria, and only 40% of prescription medicines sold in pharmacies are signed off from the verification system.
“We will insist that every drug pack be verified and signed off by the Medicines Verification System,” Denev said. This would make it impossible to export the medicines, as is now sometimes the case when medicine is fictitiously given to a patient and, at the same time, exported and resold outside the country.
(Krassen Nikolov | EURACTIV.bg)
Source: euractiv.com
