Mexican president inaugurates centralized ‘super pharmacy’ to provide medicines to all of Mexico

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president is inaugurating a “super pharmacy” in a bid to finish the woes of sufferers all through the nation who are sometimes advised they want a particular drugs – however the hospital in query doesn’t have it.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s resolution was to outfit a giant warehouse on the outskirts of Mexico City to centralize a provide and ship it to hospitals all through the nation.

“The pharmacy is going to be big, big, big, and it is going to have all the medications that are used in the heath system,” López Obrador stated Friday.

The concept is {that a} hospital in rural Mexico can put in an order for a sure treatment, which can be saved on the enormous 430,000 square-foot (40,000 sq. meter) Mexico City warehouse. The armed forces, or the government-run pharmaceutical firm Birmex, will then ship the medicine out by land, sea or air “within 24 to 48 hours,” López Obrador pledged.

The query is whether or not Mexico can overcome its historical past of being dangerous at regulating the pharmaceutical trade, dangerous at shopping for medicines, dangerous at storing them, and dangerous at distributing them. Extreme centralization additionally hasn’t helped Mexico a lot up to now in lots of areas.

The most seen face of this drawback are the mother and father of kids with most cancers, who often stage protests as a result of they are saying that lately chemotherapy and different medicine have been unattainable to acquire.

Desperate mother and father blocked visitors on the Mexico City airport final yr, holding up a banner studying: “There isn’t any chemotherapy, treatment or medicines, have some empathy and sensitivity.”

The issues have killed in any other case wholesome individuals. Because Mexico has had issues in acquiring sufficient morphine, anesthesiologists in Mexico have needed to carry round their very own vials of the sedative, drawing a number of doses out of a single vial for routine procedures like spinal blocks throughout births.

In the United States, the place there isn’t any scarcity of morphine, docs are suggested to attract a single dose from a vial and throw the rest out. But Mexico can’t do this. That has led to contamination of the vials, resulting in outbreaks of injection-induced meningitis in two Mexican states which have killed dozens of individuals, a few of them Americans who sought remedy at clinics within the border metropolis of Matamoros, throughout from Brownsville, Texas.

To López Obrador’s credit score, he mounted a serious effort to acquire COVID vaccines in 2021, utilizing the armed forces to distribute them and volunteers to assist apply them, and by the top of that yr nearly anyone in Mexico who needed a vaccine obtained one, totally free.

But attempting to duplicate that mannequin of centralized authorities buying and military distribution on a nationwide scale for hundreds of medicines isn’t the identical, in keeping with Mauricio Rodríguez, a professor on the School of Medicine at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.

“This is crazy,” stated Rodríguez, noting the federal government is opening the centralized warehouse with out answering how the system will function, particularly for urgently-needed medicines. He famous that concentrating all of the medicine at one website will increase dangers, and will sideline some already-existing distribution programs.

Many of the issues pre-date López Obrador, who took workplace in late 2018. For a long time, there have been scandals involving of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} price of medicines going out-of-date at warehouses whereas hospitals couldn’t get them.

The nation’s drugs regulatory company, recognized by its Spanish acronym as Cofepris, was already so riddled with corruption previous to López Obrador that regulators would conceal purposes for approval of recent medicines for years, and demand bribes to approve them.

And with alarming frequency, regulators in Mexico ship out alerts about falsified or knock-off medicines being offered for treating all the pieces from most cancers to coronary heart illness. Boxes, labels, vials and certifications are copied with wonderful accuracy, however the bottles usually comprise little or not one of the treatment.

The faux drugs commerce is so frequent, and so profitable in Mexico as a result of sufferers or their relations are sometimes advised by docs to purchase medicines at non-public drug shops when they’re unavailable at authorities hospitals.

The civic group “Zero Shortages” stated there was a rise of 142% within the variety of alerts about falsified medicines between 2021 and 2022.

But a part of the issues are of López Obrador’s personal making. Angry at what he claimed have been inflated income made by drug distributors and importers, the president merely minimize the non-public firms out and determined the federal government ought to instantly purchase all medicines.

Because the federal government didn’t have a lot infrastructure, contacts or expertise in such a large effort, López Obrador signed an settlement with the World Health Organization to assist Mexico in buying. But even with that assist, Mexico was unable to acquire some specialised treatment, one thing López Obrador blamed on sabotage by pharmaceutical corporations.

Rafael Gual, the director of the National Pharmaceutical Industry Chamber, stated the federal government’s personal actions created “bottlenecks” in distribution.

According to the group “Zero Shortages,” the variety of prescriptions that went unfilled in Mexico rose from 1.5 million in 2019 to 22 million in 2021; disruptions because of the COVID pandemic in all probability additionally performed a task.

But even in 2022, there have been nonetheless about 12.5 million prescriptions that went unfilled.

Dr. José Moya, the Mexico consultant of the WHO, stated centralized medical warehouses generally is a resolution, however the hot button is to have a very good logistical system.