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Drug shortages: are laboratories being penalized a good idea?
Drug shortages: are laboratories being penalized a good idea?
(France 2)
Drug shortages are a scourge that has been raging for several years now. But sanctions against laboratories that do not produce sufficient safety stocks are not everything.
Not a day goes by without Yorick Berger, pharmacist and general secretary of the Paris Pharmacists’ Union, being confronted with the problem of drug shortages. According to him, the missing drugs represent more than 1,000 references. “It goes out faster than it goes in”he said. And to point out risks for the patient whose treatment is interrupted.
The French National Agency for Medicines (ANSM) has just imposed more than 8 million euros in fines on 11 laboratories, including Sanofi. Nathalie Cautinet, a health economist, does not believe that sanctions on insufficient stocks in laboratories will put an end to the problem: “It’s not just a question of having stocks, but also of active ingredients, of having enough factories”she points out.