Vice-chairman of the pharmacists’ association Pharmasuisse is sounding the alarm: Switzerland is almost out of medicines

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Switzerland is running out of medicines. The website drugshortage.ch currently shows 948 bottlenecks in the supply of medicines for Switzerland, the CH Media newspaper writes. This means that there will be shortages of almost every third of common medicines.

What is especially precarious is that the list is getting longer every week. It includes tranquilizers and sleeping pills, antibiotics, painkillers, diabetes medications, and antihypertensives.

Switzerland has no official body

The problem: there is no official body in Switzerland that can anticipate potential bottlenecks and tackle emerging bottlenecks. The only person in Switzerland who has a comprehensive overview of the medication situation is Enea Martinelli (58).

He is chief pharmacist at Interlaken Hospital and vice-chairman of the pharmacists’ association Pharmasuisse. Martinelli has been tracking supply and delivery bottlenecks for eight years and runs the website. The fact that the list of defects must be managed privately is an indictment on Switzerland, he tells CH Media.

But there are no simple solutions. Martinelli therefore demands that the federal government finally recognizes the bottlenecks as a problem. This means, for example, that Switzerland makes its own assessment of the supply situation. The Federal Office for the Economic Supply of the State (BWL) maintains its own list. Only: This has only limited meaning because medicines are only mentioned selectively.

Federal task force at work

There are several reasons for the shortage, but these are often economic in nature. For example, it may be that only some manufacturers consider it worthwhile to produce an active ingredient. If these are lost, the entire supply chain collapses. The production of off-patent medicines is often no longer financially feasible for pharmaceutical companies.

At the beginning of this year, the federal government established a task force that introduced a number of immediate measures. Authorities are also investigating further measures. But it will be a while before anything actually happens: a report showing the Federal Council what can be done will not be available until spring next year. (oco)

Source:Blick