E-DRUG: Risk of severe shortage of essential medicines in Egypt
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Dear All E- Druggers,
For Original article:
Few hours after the Egyptian Central Bank decision of floating the local
Egyptian pound for bids and asks with immediate effect on Thursday 3rd of
November 2016, worries and concerns started to raise regarding the ability
of Egyptian generic manufacturers to resume supplying generic products to
the market.
By law, the Egyptian ministry of health controls the public and wholesale
price of the pharmaceutical products either food supplements, OTC or
prescription only medicines. With that, the Egyptian manufacturers faces a
head scratching problem to keep manufacturing medicines with APIs and
chemicals purchased mainly from China, India and Europe at the newly and
vigorously fluctuating exchange rate of USD1: EGP15 plus or minus after the
floating decision, instead of USD1: EGP8.88 before floating.
On Sunday, a couple of days after the floating decision, a top ten Egyptian
generic manufacturer with more than 200 products registered in the market,
has stopped all the promotional free samples and bonuses given to the
wholesalers until they study further the situation. Another top ten
manufacturer has decided to suspend nearly half of its products
manufacturing till further notices.
On Monday, nearly all wholesalers in Egypt has informed all retail
pharmacies that they no longer accept purchase orders for imported
pharmaceutical products until further notice. Egypt import few but
essential pharmaceuticals that are not manufactured locally such as
anti-coagulants, anti- cancer, insulin..etc
For most of generic products, Egypt relies on the local industry, it is
almost impossible to find a generic product that is imported, if you can
find an imported generic product, it is with no doubt from an ICH country.
other countries specially Asian, has no luck to register their generic
products in the Central Administration of Pharmaceutical Affairs.
Egyptian Minister of Health, Dr. Ahmed Emad, has reported in TV interview
and newspaper - 'No increase in medicines prices after the pound floating,
and nobody can threaten the government' referring to companies which intend
to suspend medicines production.
It is worth to mention, that Ministry of Health in Egypt has approved an
increase in the price of more than 1,000 registered products in Egypt in
last March as a response to companies complaints of increasing their cost
of production due to local currency depreciation. The approval was made
after discontinue of many essential products in the market.
Ahmed ABDELWAHAB
Pharmacist
Cairo,
Ahmed Abdelwahab <abdelwahab@gmail.com>