Let’s go to amoxicillin shortage? The National Agency for Medicines Safety (ANSM) confirmed on Friday that the antibiotic, used mainly to treat angina and otitis in children, “is subject to strong supply tensions in France (especially the drinkable forms), which could last up to March 2023”.
The agency specifies that one of the main reasons for these tensions lies in the sharp increase in the consumption of antibiotics, even when their prescription is not necessarily justified. Added to this phenomenon is the appearance of difficulties in industrial production lines “that have not recovered their productive capacity before the Covid-19 pandemic.”
This risk of shortages is part of a broader context, where the authorities have already been forced in recent months to toughen the use of certain medicines. The most emblematic case, paracetamol, an omnipresent analgesic in bathrooms. Authorities have recommended that pharmacists sell no more than two boxes per patient, despite manufacturers’ assurances that there will be no shortages.
The ANSM updates a daily list of medicines of greatest therapeutic interest (MITM) that are experiencing supply difficulties and for which there are currently no or very few therapeutic alternatives available on the French market.
They are “drugs or classes of drugs for which the interruption of treatment is likely to compromise the vital prognosis of patients in the short or medium term, or supposes a significant loss of opportunity for patients in terms of the severity or evolutionary potential of the disease.” illness”. “.
The complete list of the treatments in question is shown in the following table.
Concerns about shortages go back well beyond recent months, although the situation may have worsened in the context of inflation and the flare-up of geopolitical tensions with the war in Ukraine.
“Since 2008, stock shortages and supply tensions have progressed worryingly in France, but also in the United States and in other countries around the world,” Leem, the French industry lobby, pointed out in 2019.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, in 2020, a maximum of 2,446 rupture or risk of rupture reports were made to the ANSM. A year later, the agency received 2,160 complaints, five times more than in 2016, as shown in our chart below.
However, the ASNM specifies that since 2019, the agency has asked manufacturers to declare all rupture risks as high as possible, in order to better anticipate measures to reduce the impact of these probable ruptures.
“This policy of anticipation has resulted in an increase in the number of reports received,” says the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines.
Cardiovascular system, nervous system…
In its activity report for 2020, the agency presents the ranking of the most affected therapeutic families. In the first line, medicines and care related to the cardiovascular system, which represent 26.70% of the notifications to the ANSM.
This is followed by treatments that focus on the nervous system (25.55%), then anti-infectives for systemic use (11.90%), as shown in our graph below.
As regards amoxicillin, the authorities have taken a series of emergency measures, including rationing that limits the amount that each pharmacy can order. They also called on doctors and patients to use these antibiotics only if necessary: for example, they are of no interest against bronchiolitis, in the midst of an epidemic of it.
But these measures announced on Friday do not convince all observers. Said speeches “do not attack the structural causes,” estimated in a press release the Observatory for Transparency in Drug Policies, an organization marked by the left.
It regrets the lack of response from the authorities in the face of a “foreseeable” situation that requires a massive relocation of drug production in France, and believes that the fragmentation of this production in various countries contributes to supply problems.
For amoxicillin, while asking laboratories to increase their production capacity, the Medicines Agency also indicated that investigations were “in progress to identify ways to import these antibiotics from abroad.”
Source: BFM TV
