A survey by the National Confederation of Municipalities (CNM) found that 80.4% of the 2,469 municipalities that responded to the consultation reported a lack of basic pharmaceutical care medicines.
In an interview with CNN this Friday (22), the president of the Union of Hospitals, Clinics and Laboratories of the State of São Paulo (Sindhosp), Francisco Balestrin, said that the impact of the lack of medicines affects hospitals and pharmacies.
“We began to identify that the major constraint that hospitals were having in terms of patient care was the lack of some medications. Some basic and others that are more complex, such as antibiotics and contrast agents. Even saline and dipyrone, which is a drug that we all know,” she says.
“When this reaches private hospitals, as is the case now, it has already reached the public sector and also mainly affected the stock of pharmacies”, warns Balestrin.
The expert points out that the lack of medicines is a problem with multifactorial causes, including dependence on imports of inputs used in the manufacture of drugs.
“What is actually lacking are the so-called active pharmacological ingredients, which are those salts with which medicines are made. Most of them are imported and then they are produced here in Brazil,” he says.
The main producing countries of pharmaceutical ingredients are India and China. According to Balestrin, imports of inputs are affected by factors that impact production by countries.
“China, we all know, has that Covid Zero policy. So any outbreak that happens in that country, he simply locks down, some cities are even closed and the production mainly of these inputs is abandoned, it stops. So these products end up being scarce. As they produce for the whole world, then you will have a large flow of countries after these products”, he explains.
According to the expert, the war in Ukraine also influences the flow of exports and imports of products.
“When you have the constraint of the normal flow of these products – and a war ends up causing this, because air flows become more complex, you end up having an increase in oil, a rise in the dollar. All these things end up disrupting the normal production line of these APIs and especially their exportation”, he says.
Source: CNN Brasil
