Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9057

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Hill S.
Medicines Prices and Malaysia—Untangling the Medicines Web
PLoS Med 2007 Mar 27; 4:(3):e149
http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040149

Abstract:

“Pharmaceuticals make a major to contribution to health. However, as noted by Ess et al., in Europe over the last 20 years, expenditure on pharmaceuticals has grown faster than the gross national product, and Wagner and McCarthy described the problem in low-income countries where “the vast majority are unwilling to pay for effective drugs simply because they are unable to pay” [1,2]. Up until the 1990s, studies examining drug prices were few and far between, and in developing countries were nonexistent. Measuring comparative prices of medicines was seen as complex, and rightly so-many methodological challenges face such studies (Box 1) [3,4].

Work by Health Action International (HAI) in the late 1990s started to address these questions. In 1998, a study reported by HAI [5] described the variability of the price of ranitidine, sampled in multiple countries. In India at that time, one hundred 150 mg tablets could be bought for USD 2, whereas in South Africa, the price was USD 150. The key message from this study was that prices of common medicines vary enormously between countries and often within countries as well. If affordability is a barrier to availability of medicines, this was one of the first studies to try to quantify the gap…”

Notes:

Free full text