RPT - Demand For Painkillers Reaches Unprecedented Heights In EU Amid COVID-19 - Association

GENOA (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 27th May, 2020) ENOA, Italy, May 27 (Sputnik), Anastasia Levchenko - The demand for certain medicines, including painkillers, has reached unprecedented levels in Europe during the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing pharmaceutical firms to raise production rapidly, Adrian van den Hoven, the director general of the Medicines for Europe alliance representing the generic and biosimilar pharmaceutical industries across the continent, told Sputnik in an interview.

According to the director general, Europe has seen a surge in demand for medicines that are not designed to treat COVID-19 but are instead used to treat chronic diseases or cancer. The cause of this uptick in demand since early March is thought to be the result of citizens being scared to visit doctors and preferring instead to build personal stockpiles of treatments at home.

"The demand for medicines increased like 50 percent in March," van den Hoven said.

Medicines for Europe has played a critical role in some of the continent's epicenters of the COVID-19 outbreak, such as Italy and the United Kingdom, which have both already reported more than 230,000 cases of the disease, the director general said.

"The critical role [that we played during COVID-19 pandemic] was in the countries that were very heavily hit by the coronavirus, like Italy or Spain or France or Belgium or the UK, where a lot of patients went to the hospital with respiratory problems and then they were put on mechanical ventilation machines," van den Hoven said.

The association head clarified that COVID-19 patients who require the use of ventilators must also be given painkillers and muscle relaxants, which also has stretched supply chains of these treatments.

"What people do not know is that when you put patients on those machines, they consume a huge amount of medicines, especially sedatives, muscle relaxants, pain medicines like Fentanyl or other pain treatments and some resuscitating medicines. And these medicines, they are mainly generic medicines, we produce a lot of them. But the demand in these countries with a lot of patients really went very, very high to levels we've never, ever seen before," van den Hoven continued.

Scaling up production of these drugs has created multiple challenges for pharmaceutical companies, since they must be manufactured in a specific way to ensure a high degree of sterility, the director general of the association explained.

"To give you an example, with Midazolam, which is an anesthetic, in France, the demand increased by four times above their total annual consumption. We don't just have this kind of huge stock of medicines lying around. We had to produce it, find it, import it if necessary. This was something very complex. That was a very extreme example, but there were other examples like that, where we really struggled to match the huge demand," van den Hoven said.

Moving treatments across Europe has also proven a challenge given that many of the continent's top pharmaceutical producers have also been severely affected by the coronavirus disease outbreak, the director general stated.

"That was also tricky because other countries wanted to keep the medicines for themselves in case they would have a big outbreak. So, there were a lot of delicate discussions about that, moving medicines from one country to another. That is, I would say, the most unusual thing we did because this is not the kind of thing that our association usually does. We do not intervene so directly into markets like we did during this pandemic," van den Hoven said.

Generic drugs are an exact copy of a brand-name drug when the latter's patent expires. Biosimilar medicines are modeled off different treatments and are almost identical. Both kinds of drugs have cost and accessibility benefits, and close to 70 percent of drugs in Europe are either generic or biosimilar.

According to the European Centres for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), more than 1.3 million cases of the coronavirus disease have been reported in countries of the European Union, European Economic Area, and the United Kingdom, resulting in the deaths of more than 160,000 people.

The ECDC on Tuesday registered 8,604 cases over the preceding 24 hours.