HEALTH-CUBA: Nearly 80 Percent of Medicines Produced Locally

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Mar 19 2001 (IPS) - Nearly 80 percent of pharmaceutical products employed in Cuba are locally manufactured – a proportion that authorities want to push even higher over the next few years.

The growth of the local pharmaceutical industry, which by the mid-1990s was bringing Cuba some 100 million dollars a year in export earnings, has not only covered domestic demand for medicines, but has also led to the development of products that compete on the international market today.

Cuba is the only country in the world, for example, that has come up with an effective vaccine against the deadly meningitis B. The vaccine is administered free of charge to all children in Cuba, and sold to countries like Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.

Of the 785 pharmaceutical products sold in Cuba, 178 are imported. Nationally produced medicines are sold at heavily subsidised prices in the government network of neighbourhood pharmacies that sell products in Cuban pesos, according to the Health Ministry.

However, a survey carried out in pharmacies late last year by the local magazine Bohemia failed to find 211 of the medicines included on the official list of products produced to attend to the health of this Caribbean island nation’s population of 11 million.

“They say scarcity of medicine is no longer such a serious problem, but I’ve been trying for days to buy aspirin in this pharmacy, and they always tell me there aren’t any,” complained María Dolores Peña, a 60-year-old pensioner, outside her neighbourhood pharmacy.

The ever-popular aspirin figures among the few products that can be obtained without medical prescription. Peña said she hoped to obtain a prescription that same afternoon to buy dipyrone, an analgesic and antipyretic, which, she added, “they have today, but it runs out fast.”

Peña acknowledged, however, that only at the peak of the “special period” – the official euphemism for the severe economic recession Cuba has been suffering since the disappearance of the east European socialist bloc in the early 1990s – did she have to go without the medicine she needs to treat her thyroid condition.

Patients with chronic ailments present a medical certificate and are registered in their neighbourhood pharmacy, which ensures their supply of the medicine they need.

But authorities say the production of generic drugs is often affected by a lack of financial resources needed to purchase the necessary raw materials.

In some cases, the cost of inputs is driven up by the problems posed by the 40-year-old United States economic and trade embargo.

At low, stable prices, China provides around 40 percent of the raw materials used by Cuba’s pharmaceutical industry, although the distances involved mean transportation of the products often takes a month and a half or even longer.

Government officials here point out that for fear of reprisals from Washington, many merchant marine ships avoid docking in Cuban ports, a fact that frequently forces Cuba to resort to the more costly air shipment of raw materials and medicines.

Given all of these difficulties, it is cheaper to produce generic products than import the drugs.

According to the article by Bohemia, a bottle of cyclosporine, which reduces organ rejection in transplant patients, costs nearly 400 dollars on the international market, while Cuba’s pharmaceutical industry produces it for less than 60 dollars.

The local pharmaceutical industry has 12 factories, which even produce some costly medicines like the anti-retroviral drugs for treating AIDS and immunomodulators for treating organ transplant patients.

Within the next few months, Cuba plans to increase its exports to Brazil, with the sale of more than 100 generic medicines, the price of which will be 60 percent below those of brand-name versions.

Since 1996, Brazil has imported from Cuba some 100,000 annual doses of the vaccine for hepatitis B and one million doses of the vaccine against meningitis B, which kills an average of 50,000 children and adolescents worldwide every year.

Brazil is now reportedly interested in importing medicines ranging from over-the-counter painkillers to compounds that boost the immune systems of cancer and AIDS patients.

Medicuba, the biggest marketer of locally manufactured medical products, currently exports to more than 20 countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe.

Alfonso Sánchez Díaz, the director of the company, which has 260 products registered in 34 nations, stated that the exported drugs were never short on the domestic market. On the contrary, he said, “the more products sold, the more money we will have to buy drugs that we do not produce here.”