Thursday, October 04, 2007 Braga: Children left out in Cheap Medicines Act By Grace L. Plata
COUNCILOR Pilar Braga decries the fact that children are left out in the proposed Cheap Medicines Act while calling for the government to help local drug companies come up with products that can compete with imported drugs.
"Among those lobbying heavily for the passage of the bill are advocacy organizations working with the elderly. They've rightly pointed out that the country's expensive medicines have been a terrible burden especially for the elderly and the families that have to foot their medical bills. But sometimes we forget that there is another large segment of population that also held ransom - the children," Braga said is a privileged speech Tuesday.
Braga tackled preventable death if only vaccines were made available.
"Vaccines play a key role in the prevention of infant mortality. Fortunately, the government does provide free BCG (tubercolosis), DPT (diptheria, whooping cough and tetanus), OPV (oral polio vaccine), and hepatitis B vaccines. Additional vaccines for flu, chickenpox, MMR (measles, mumps and rubella), however, have to be paid for with private physicians and these can run into several thousand pesos. As far as I know, they are not reimbursable with PhilHealth or any private health maintenance organizations," Braga said.
High cost of antibiotics for respiratory infections in children as well as common vitamins, according to Braga, can cause a big dent on the family's budget.
"If you work out unit costs, children's medicines are always more expensive than those for adults. A safer cost-cutting measure is to look for generic preparations but the range of generic alternatives for children is actually smaller than that for adults. And where they are available, the difference in cost may not always be significant," Braga said.
Braga, however, said that parallel imports are in fact part of what the Cheaper Medicines Bill hopes to do. Before the last Congress ended, they were dealing with patents and other issues raised by drug companies.
"The new Congress will have to tackle all these issues again but in the long run, lets hope lawmakers will also begin to look at the long-standing question of production. We are almost totally dependent on imports of pharmaceuticals," Braga said.
This dependency, according to the councilor, can be lessened if the government or a large Filipino drug company could come up with a genuine competition against multinationals.
This, according to Braga, would force multinationals to bring down costs of their products. Same practice has been proven effective by the governments and local drug laboratories in Thailand and India.
