“I have invited the Guyana Pharmacy Council and the Pharmacy Association to a meeting on Thursday to discuss the issue,” the Minister told Stabroek News yesterday.
Last week Wednesday the minister had called upon pharmacies to stop selling the single-dose artemisinin by this year end or the Food & Drugs Department would seize the drug from their shelves.
Yesterday the minister said that while he had warned the importation of the drug, which is easily accessible, might be restricted, he had since been advised that this was a move his ministry would have to take. He also said that he did not have an issue with private hospitals and private doctors as they “generally adhere to the rules,” but rather with the pharmacies who continued to sell the single-dose drug, which the World Health organisation (WHO) had warned against using since resistance had been detected.
According to Dr Ramsammy prior to 2002 private shops were “blatantly” selling drugs without a prescription and pharmacies had taken on the job of primary health care as they diagnosed, prescribed and sold the drug to the patients. While this was no longer the case, Dr Ramsammy said he had a serious issue with them now selling the single-dose drug.
Discussing the negative impact the sale of this drug had on the malaria fight, the Minister said there were short and long-term impacts. The long-term one was persons developing a resistance to the drug. To protect the effectiveness of the drug it should be used as part of a combination, otherwise the parasite took a long time to die. Touching on the short term, the Minister said in Guyana there were three different types of malaria and there were different treatment combinations for each; if someone went to a pharmacy suffering from fever, therefore, and the diagnosis was not done by a health-care worker, they may very well receive the wrong treatment. That meant the person would not be cured and transmission would continue putting people around them at risk. “That is why our numbers would not go down, because some persons are not being cured and they keep coming back and being counted,” the minister said.
He expressed the hope that Thursday’s meeting would see a change in how pharmacies sold the drug.
