Online platform aims to limit medicine shortages

There is a shortage of many pharmaceutical products and pharmacists fear that it will get worse over the winter, when respiratory illnesses will flare up again.

The National Organization for Medicines (EOF) has activated an online platform for medicine wholesale sellers to declare their stocks and asked them Wednesday to register within seven days. In the organization’s latest list, 127 drugs are in chronic short supply, while there is a ban on exporting 170. The Panhellenic Association of Pharmacists claims the drugs that are scarce approach 300 and, earlier this month, demanded that EOF add another 120 drugs to the export ban list.

Manolis Katsarakis, general secretary of the pharmacists’ association tells Kathimerini that the export bans are temporary and that, indeed, supply tends to become normal as long as the ban lasts. When the ban is lifted, shortages appear again, Katsarakis says.