Bulgarian health ministry admits drug bottleneck – EURACTIV.com
Some medicines are held up by wholesalers in Bulgaria, and patients cannot find them when needed, the health ministry said on Monday.
Medications for asthma and COPD, epilepsy, diabetes, cancer, blood thinners, immunosuppressants and muscle relaxants are medications that patients struggle to find.
“I can’t tell you why this is happening. Our goal is to find the causes and eliminate them. There will be sanctions,” Deputy Health Minister Alexander Zlatanov said after the first meeting of the Special Council for Drug Supply Control – a body set up by the Minister of Health 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 minimize the risk of drug shortages in the market through additional imports, regulation and stricter control.
A dozen different drugs are thought to be missing from the shelves, but the number could be higher as planned inspections of wholesalers and pharmacies are incomplete.
Next week, the special counsel will discuss the formula for entering drugs on an export prohibited list.
Some drugs that are hard to find or missing from the Bulgarian market are exported from the country due to flaws in the functioning of the electronic drug shortage tracking system.
Deyan Denev, executive director of the Association of Research-Based Pharmaceutical Manufacturers in Bulgaria (ARPhaM), explained that the pan-European drug verification system, which has been operating since 2019 and aims to prevent counterfeit products from entering market, can help monitor drug availability in the country.
Currently, however, the system is not fully functioning in Bulgaria and only 40% of prescription drugs sold in pharmacies are validated by the verification system.
“We will insist that every medicine package be checked and approved by the medicine verification system,” Denev said. This would make it impossible to export drugs, as is sometimes the case today when drugs are fictitiously given to a patient and, at the same time, exported and resold outside the country.
(Krassen Nikolov | EURACTIV.bg)
