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Malta’s good deal on medicine

By Marika Azzopardi

Maltese patients are getting a very good deal indeed where free medicines are concerned.

In a country where the national health service has worked steadily to offer free health care and free medication to patients in state hospitals, one would be wise to keep track of what it costs to keep the ball rolling.

It is one thing popping into the local pharmacy and buying over the counter medication, but it is something else altogether to have to buy drugs on prescription. But the crux of the matter is to gauge what it takes to supply patients with a constant flow of the required drugs, especially when these sufferers are terminally ill or have a life-threatening condition.

Such medicines are not available on prescription and MaltaToday has taken a sample of typical drugs used for some of the most serious illnesses around. We compared cost prices from those of the original patent holder to those from India’s generic drug industries to what the Ministry of Health has quoted as the cost for Malta’s hospitals.

Drug description
Ciproflaxcin is an antibiotic drug.
Zidovudine is an anti-retroviral, nucleoside analog.
Indinavir is a protease inhibitor.
Lamivudine is an anti-HIV treatment in the same class of drugs as AZT, ddI, ddC and d4T. These drugs are called nucleoside analogs.
Erythropoetin is used to treat anemia associated with HIV infection or AZT therapy.

Atorvastatin calcium is a synthetic lipid-lowering agent.

One immediately notes that an AIDS patient requires Lm 9.84 per dose, composed of six Zidovudine tablets, six Indinavir tablets and two Lamivudine tablets. Colon cancer sufferers also require a considerable amount of medication which, as one can see from the table, is extremely costly.

Comparisons might lead one to question why the Indian industries charge so low a price for the drugs they produce. Whilst multi-nationals stay attached to their stringent patent rules, India’s drug industry, which is regarded as being a scrappy generic set-up, strives to have standards established under a relaxed global patent. India is not the only country producing such drugs which are generic, however its standards do not fall under the WTO’s 1995 Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Therefore its products are not considered as being legal generics. There is a mounting worldwide debate over patents and drug costs, which spills over into political debates.

Italy is making generic drugs available in its pharmacies and these are being sold alongside the drugs produced from the patent owners. This has caused uproar amongst pharmaceutical companies who have had to lower prices to compare with the lower-priced generic items.