Netherlands hit hard by EU-wide medicine shortage

The entire European Union is facing a shortage of certain medicines, but the Netherlands is hit extra hard. The Netherlands is listed among all 15 shortages currently registered by the European Medicines Agency (EMA). Most other European countries are short of only a few medicines, Trouw reports.

In the past year, a medicine was unavailable in the Netherlands for two weeks or longer 1,514 times, according to figures from the Dutch pharmacists association KNMP. The association said that was the highest number of shortages since it started keeping track of the figure 19 years ago. A year earlier, there were unavailable medicines 1,007 times.

There are several reasons for the current shortages. Raw materials and medicines are made by an increasingly smaller group of factories in countries like China and India. The coronavirus pandemic showed that this made the availability of medicines vulnerable, and the export of medicines from those countries came to a standstill during the pandemic. The resulting shortages still have not been eliminated.

The Netherlands also charges low prices for its medicines. Manufacturers, therefore, prefer to sell scarce drugs to countries that are willing to pay more for them, according to Trouw. And the Netherlands only keeps small medicine stocks to save costs. That makes it more challenging to deal with shortages.

According to a study by the European organization of pharmaceutical companies PGEU, half of EU countries dealt with more considerable medicine shortages in 2022 than in 2021. The situation didn’t improve in a single country. The current deficits are mainly medicines used for a shorter period of time, such as paracetamol and certain types of antibiotics. More specific shortages include medicine for patients who have had a heart attack, insulin and Ozempic for diabetic patients, and several cancer treatments.

The EMA has urged European doctors to only prescribe antibiotics for bacterial infections. It is confident that the shortages will be resolved in the coming months.

The European Commissioner for Health, Stella Kyriakides, said that the current shortages of medicines “are a concern for Member States and worldwide.” She is working on a plan for the pharmaceutical industry to end a series of bottlenecks to increase the production of medicines. According to Trouw, the plan should have been completed in December, but its presentation was recently postponed for the third time. The European Commissioner is now aiming for April 26.