2023-07-04 16:14:03
The Minister of Health François Braun revealed on Tuesday June 13 a list of 450 essential drugs whose supply will have to be secured. For these drugs, manufacturers will have to provide four months of stock. Problem: No antiretroviral, the class used once morest HIV, is one of them.
Faced with the shortages affecting certain molecules, the French government has declared its intention to secure the supply of 450 “essential” drugs, including around fifty whose production will have to be relocated. The list was published on June 13 on the website of the Ministry of Health and Prevention.
This statement is part of a desire to promote measures to strengthen French drug production capacities. France depends in fact up to 60 to 80% on imports, particularly from China, for the production of mature drugs (antibiotics, anesthesia products, etc.). Last year, France faced an unprecedented shortage according to the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM): 3,747 supply disruptions were reported in 2022, compared to only 871 in 2018.
An evolving but already criticized list
If the initiative is generally considered to be welcome, the composition of the list is already being debated. For the review Prescribethis list “includes useless drugs, even to be excluded from the care, and omits others that are actually essential in many common care situations”. Even more, “the method of drawing up this list and the management of conflicts of interest pose a problem by their opacity”.
The French Society for the Fight once morest AIDS (SFLS), which was not asked to draw up this list, is concerned, she, “not to see any of the antiretroviral drugs that have proven their effectiveness in the treatment and prevention of HIV infection appear. Human immunodeficiency virus. In English: HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus). Isolated in 1983 at the Pasteur Institute in Paris; recently discovered (2008) rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi.” and recalls that “the interruption linked to the unavailability of these antiretrovirals can lead to dramatic individual and collective situations”.
The SFLS regrets that “several drugs that do not appear on this list have been recognized as essential and integrated into public health plans”, particularly in the field of sexual health and it is surprised that “in the document from the Ministry of Health and Prevention, sexual health is reduced to medical abortion and emergency contraception alone, in contradiction with the National Strategy for Sexual Health (SNSS)”.
The list is presented as “evolving” on the ministry’s website. The SFLS recommends that there be added at least one to two molecules of each main class of antiretrovirals, favoring “those which are currently recommended as first line of treatment and those whose patent has passed into the public domain”.
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