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Two basic reasons, without eliminating other reasons, make the lives of thousands of patients on the line today, with a series of essential drugs and their alternatives cut. Sometimes, it goes to the point of discontinuing medications without alternatives. This is what happened yesterday with breast cancer patients and what is happening today with heart patients who have been suffering for more than a month from the Centrum drug discontinuation. It is an anticoagulant medication used by patients who have undergone open heart surgery, in which diseased valves are replaced with artificial valves. The problem faced by thousands of patients with iron chest valves is that there is no substitute for this drug, which costs no more than 6,500 pounds. According to the president of the European-Asian Society for Heart Surgery, Dr. George Tady, this drug is necessary because it “prevents the formation of clots or blood clots in the valve, which can lead to strokes or stop the valve from functioning. , and lung congestion and shortness of breath can cause sudden death. “
In the past, the uses of Centrum were limited to “killing mice and rats, as it causes a strong liquefaction of the blood.” So it is a very old medicine and its price is cheap and affordable. Today, with its “interruption”, the options can be narrowed a lot, although there is an alternative in some rare cases, it is “a needle that is inserted under the skin and its effect lasts between 12 and 24 hours at most”, according to one of cardiologists. Aside from the pain that the patient suffers when taking the needle, the situation does not seem to be suitable for many patients in terms of their purchasing power, since the price of a needle is “three or four times” the price of “Centrum”.
In this sense, you can not do without this drug. That’s what the medicine says. Here, for about a month, thousands of patients have had to deal with losing it. As for the reasons? That is another scandal. There is something known and common to most of the court medicines, which is the long permanence of the files in the Banque du Liban and the delay in the opening of credits, which is reflected in a delay in the importation of medicines and, for so much, in its interruption. In addition, the smuggling of medicines abroad is added, especially after the price of medicines in Lebanon has become very low compared to other countries. The third obvious reason is that warehouse owners and merchants store drugs in preparation to sell at a higher price when subsidies are increased, as well as people who store some drugs for fear of a disruption.
All this happened in the case of the drug “Centrum” and others as well. But what can be added here could be surreal. According to Dr. Malik Muhammad, director of the Lebanese Association of Cardiologists, the drug is produced locally, but its raw materials are imported from abroad, and what happens is that “these materials have been present in the port for about a month, but unfortunately It is stored in a warehouse that contains materials classified as dangerous, just because it is dust. Muhammad proceeded to contact the Customs Administration to clarify the cause of this confusion: “We promised to resolve the matter within hours or days at the latest.”
There is another problem that, according to several doctors, constitutes the core of the causes, and that is that what we are witnessing today in the series of medicines “is evidence of the failure of the current subsidy system that aims to support the consumption of medicines, their various commercial types, without taking into account the logic of rationalization. ” The responsibility here lies first and foremost with the Ministry of Health, which today is content to “play the role of a small policeman”, while what is required is “to modify the subsidy system to achieve two basic things: reduce the invoice of the subsidies and, later, that the medicine reaches the patients “. In this context, the Association of Health Volunteers is preparing to publish the plan for “drug support reform”, especially since it is unacceptable that “a bankrupt country is financing a drug support plan as it was before bankruptcy “. These two goals are the foundation of that plan, so drug support becomes continuous without fear of sudden disruption. What does the plan include? One of the association’s doctors is enough to give an example of what this reform means, pointing out that “in most cases there are several commercial types for a formula (20 types in one of the cholesterol-lowering drugs), and here, within the framework of the reform process, the effective and cheapest rate can be supported instead of supporting the most expensive rate, which has the same composition, with the possibility of supporting two other types as an alternative in the event of a claim. This is one of the options that could exempt the ministry from monitoring what the traffickers do.
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