Patients squeezed in drug war
Published:Sunday | January 9, 2011 | 12:00 AM
WESTERN BUREAU:
HYPERTENSIVE patients who depend on the drugs Amlodipine and Normodipine - generic brands of the Pfizer-patented Norvasc - have been forced to pay in full for their medication after the National Health Fund (NHF) removed its subsidy in October last year.
The subsidy, The Sunday Gleaner understands, was withdrawn as a result of an unresolved court battle between local distributors of the drugs Medimpex Jamaica and LASCO, and Pfizer, the international pharmaceutical company.
The Supreme Court in 2009 handed down the ruling that the Pfizer-patented Norvasc had become invalid in Jamaica, although it was still being sold in pharmacies.
Pfizer took its case to the Court of Appeal last March hoping to quash the ruling, but after 10 months, the Court of Appeal has not returned a verdict.
"The extended time taken by the courts to determine the patent status of the product has resulted in tremendous suffering for the patients who use the medication, and high unnecessary expenditure by the Government to purchase Norvasc," said Medimpex's marketing manager, Basil Wright. He added, "It has also extended Pfizer's stranglehold on the health sector."
In fact, with the length of time that the court has been taking to make a decision, people who are hypertensive and who are National Health Fund (NHF) beneficiaries no longer enjoy access to the drug as a result of the legal issues.
In a Sunday Gleaner advertisement of October 3, 2010, the NHF announced that it was suspending subsidies for Amlodipine. The fund noted that the drug was only one of 54 drugs for which the NHF provided a subsidy for the treatment of hypertension.
Despite winning a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against Pfizer nearly two years ago, the local distributors have been left hanging and barred from selling the generic brands.
Section 29 of the patent law states that once a patent is granted for a product in Jamaica, if it expires in the rest of the world, then the Jamaican patent automatically expires. Despite this, Pfizer's attorney, Maurice Courtenay Robinson, got an injunction against Medimpex Jamaica and LASCO.
Commenting on removal of the subsidy and the impact it is likely to have on dependent patients, Basil Wright said that the generic drug works well for many patients.
"The profile for Amlodipine works, and it has very minimal side effects," Wright said, arguing that "most hypertensive drugs result in stomach problems and headaches, with the likelihood of men becoming sterile in some cases, but Amlodipine works differently".
His argument is supported by local pharmaceutical company Indies Pharma, and its president, Dr Guna Muppuri, who says, "Amlodipine protects patients from the devastating compli-cations of severe congestive heart failure, stroke, renal failure, and other vascular complications due to hypertension."
Defying Pfizer threats, Dr Muppuri released his generic brand, Amlocor, into the market in 2009, but has since received a series of warnings in writing from that organisation's lawyers, Grant, Stewart, Phillips and Company.
In the last letter he received in August 2010, he was warned that if he continued to sell the drug, action would be enforced against his company.
"The decision by NHF and Health Cor-poration Limited is going to further let every senior citizen of this country who was blessed to buy a month's supply of their Amlodipine at a cost of J$40.00 per month (US$0.45c/month) on JADEP, now have to spend no less than J$4,000 a month in the retail market," the doctor said.
He added: "This, of course, is going to make many of our senior citizens die like soap bubbles due to stroke and other complications."
Hypertensive patient Pauline Reid of Rose Mount said her bill was $15,000 when she visited the doctor last Thursday. "I could only buy some of the medications because I just couldn't afford the others," she said.