Netherlands facing another antibiotics shortage as winter approaches
With winter approaching, medicine wholesalers expect the Netherlands will again face antibiotic shortages. The government said it wanted to build up extra stocks after last winter’s shortages. But so far, little has come of it, the trade association of wholesalers, BG Pharma, told AD.
There isn’t much wholesalers can do without the government, chairman Léon Tinke told the newspaper. “We need extra money for that and permission to possibly get it from abroad.”
The Ministry of Public Health, Welfare, and Sports told AD that preparations are in “full swing " and that it is consulting with the wholesalers. “I have found money to build up extra stocks,” Health Minister Fleur Ageman said on Friday morning.
It is already challenging to obtain children’s antibiotics and azithromycin, an antibiotic for respiratory infections, skin infections, and sexually transmitted infections. Part of the problem, especially with children’s antibiotics, is that pharmaceutical companies make very little money from them. Prices are low, and few children need the medicine. And because children receive the medicine as an emulsion, separate and relatively expensive production is necessary. Fewer and fewer manufacturers make antibiotics.
“It will be a matter of making do again if there are many infections this winter and there is a great demand worldwide,” Heiman Wertheim, a medical microbiologist and professor of Medical Microbiology at Radboudumc, told AD. That’s not great when it comes to life-saving medicines like antibiotics.
“The biggest problem, namely that antibiotics are only produced in a few places in the world, has not been solved. And if you pay little, you are at the back of the line. A pack of antibiotics is often cheaper than chewing gum. It is important that we become less dependent on one party,” Wertheim said.
Antibiotics researcher Nathaniel Martin of Leiden University thinks that Western countries have become complacent about antibiotics because they've been cheap and available. He expects that only when Western countries start paying more will more manufacturers start producing again.
