Mexican president inaugurates centralized ‘super pharmacy’ to produce 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 informed they want a selected medication – however the hospital in query doesn’t have it.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s resolution was to outfit an enormous 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 mentioned Friday.

The concept is {that a} hospital in rural Mexico can put in an order for a sure treatment, which will probably 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 unhealthy at regulating the pharmaceutical business, unhealthy at shopping for medicines, unhealthy at storing them, and unhealthy at distributing them. Extreme centralization additionally hasn’t helped Mexico a lot prior to now in lots of areas.

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

Desperate mother and father blocked site 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 a scarcity of morphine, medical doctors are suggested to attract a single dose from a vial and throw the rest out. But Mexico can’t try 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 therapy at clinics within the border metropolis of Matamoros, throughout from Brownsville, Texas.

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

But making an attempt to duplicate that mannequin of centralized authorities buying and armed forces distribution on a nationwide scale for 1000’s of medicines isn’t the identical, based on Mauricio Rodríguez, a professor on the School of Medicine at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.

“This is crazy,” mentioned 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 methods.

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 For many years, there have been scandals involving of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} value of medicines going out-of-date at warehouses whereas hospitals couldn’t get them.

The nation’s medication regulatory company, identified by its Spanish acronym as Cofepris, was already so riddled with corruption previous to López Obrador that regulators would cover functions 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 every part from most cancers to coronary heart illness. Boxes, labels, vials and certifications are copied with superb accuracy, however the bottles typically comprise little or not one of the treatment.

The pretend medication commerce is so frequent, and so profitable in Mexico as a result of sufferers or their kin are sometimes informed by medical doctors to purchase medicines at non-public drug shops when they’re unavailable at authorities hospitals.

The civic group “Zero Shortages” mentioned 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 lower the non-public corporations out and determined the federal government ought to straight 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 companies.

Rafael Gual, the director of the National Pharmaceutical Industry Chamber, mentioned 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 as a result of 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, mentioned centralized medical warehouses is usually a resolution, however the secret’s to have a very good logistical system.

“If they are considering a warehouse like this, it’s because there is a need,” Moya mentioned, “and this has to be very well organized.”