Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-The Zimbabwe Diabetic Association (ZDA) has accused local pharmacies of being insensitive to the plight of diabetic patients through excessive mark-ups to the prices of drugs.
This comes in the wake of the ZDA engaging and coming up with an agreement for subsidized diabetes medicines with drug supplier, NORVATIS.
The Chairman of the ZDA Dr John Chamunorwa Mangwiro told News of the South that the current pricing of most medicines for the disease is beyond the economic means of many due in part to profiteering pharmacies.
Mangwiro said after engaging Norvartis International Norvodsk to reduce its prices it had come up against the stumbling block of pharmacies that have refused to play ball.
“It’s difficult to control the pricing of drugs when they get to pharmacies as the prices we would have negotiated to be brought down suddenly spike up for no apparent economical reason”
Currently NORVATIS has offered to subsidise the prices of some of the drugs in a scheme similar to the one being implemented in Somalia.
The Somali scheme with NORVATIS has diabetic patients paying a dollar every month for a supply of their medicine.
Mangwiro said the company is waiting for statistics on the number of people who are diabetic to table it to the NORVATIS president who is coming to Zimbabwe soon.
“We are thus appealing to the government to assist us in this endeavour so that we can be able to come up with a scheme that will help all the diabetic people in the country”,he said.
Currently about 1,5 million Zimbabweans are diabetic, with some of them unaware they have the condition according to statements attributed to Health minister David Parirenyatwa.
The last statistics concerning the disease are from 2005 and show that the prevalence rate is 10% of the population.
Since then the figure is believed to have risen to between 12 and 15% and that means up to 1,5 million are diabetic.
Of these, 95% of the diabetes is type two, which is mainly caused by poor lifestyles namely consumption of too much starch, which is converted to fat, leading to obesity, hyperlipidaemia, hypertension and diabetes mellitus.
This is compounded by lack of physical activity, which is very rampant in urban areas these days.
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