Parliament suggests establishing General Authority for Medicine

CAIRO – 20 July 2017: Establishing a General Authority for Medicine to monitor the system is a better solution than hiring a deputy minister to solve the shortage of medicine crisis, according to Hamam el-Adly, President of the Proposals and Complaints Committee in Parliament.

Adly added that such organization would need a large budget to improve the medicine industry and resolve its problems, as well as restructuring all pharmaceutical companies in the business sector.

Parliamentarian Samir Rashad Abou Taleb’s proposed to Prime Minister Sherif Ismail to hire a deputy minister of health to control the continuous increase in the prices of medical drugs and their shortages in hospitals and pharmacies which results in a black market for drugs.

The Medicines Industry in Egypt simultaneously tackles the counterfeit medicine crisis along with shortages.

In 2015, Tarek Salman, Assistant Minister of Health for Pharmacy Affairs, stated that establishing a barcode system to track the manufacture and distribution of all drugs would necessitate a large database to keep track of production records and constant communication between all pharmaceutical producers and distributors.

The barcode system would detect counterfeit drugs because they would not be recorded on the database.

On May 14, 2017, Ahmed Emad, Minister of Health and Population, stated that the barcode system would be set up by the beginning of the year 2018, pending all companies’ ability to comply with database specifications.