In­dia's re­stric­tion on the ex­port of cer­tain drugs due to sup­ply is­sues caused by the glob­al nov­el coro­n­avirus out­break could af­fect Trinidad and To­ba­go, es­pe­cial­ly the pub­lic health sec­tor. How­ev­er, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer (CMO) Dr Roshan Paras­ram says the Min­istry of Health had an­tic­i­pat­ed such an event and is set to meet with stake­hold­ers this morn­ing to dis­cuss pos­si­ble al­ter­na­tive sup­plies for the med­ica­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­port from the BBC, In­dia's re­stric­tion "comes as many drug in­gre­di­ent mak­ers in Chi­na re­main shut or cut out­put. In­dia's drug mak­ers re­ly on Chi­na for al­most 70% of the ac­tive in­gre­di­ents in their med­i­cines, and in­dus­try ex­perts have warned that they are like­ly to face short­ages if the epi­dem­ic con­tin­ues."

In­dia is the world's biggest sup­pli­er of gener­ic drugs but the coun­try has re­strict­ed ex­ports of 26 in­gre­di­ents and the med­i­cines made from them in light of their own sup­ply short­ages. Drugs af­fect­ed in­clude Parac­eta­mol and var­i­ous an­tibi­otics.

Asked yes­ter­day whether In­dia's de­ci­sion posed any threat to T&T sup­ply chain, Phar­ma­cy Board pres­i­dent An­drew Ra­haman told Guardian Me­dia: "Par­tic­u­lar­ly in the gov­ern­ment sec­tor. There is a bit of an over-re­liance on phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals from In­dia. In the pri­vate sec­tor, it won't be much of a both­er. We have quite a few things from In­dia but there are many oth­er op­tions from oth­er parts of the world. "

How­ev­er, Paras­ram ex­plained that the min­istry rou­tine­ly mon­i­tors glob­al events for any threat in drug sup­ply for such oc­cur­rences. As such, he said since the ex­tent of the coro­n­avirus was re­alised ear­li­er this year they have been in touch with the agency which pro­cures the med­ica­tion on be­half of the min­istry - the Na­tion­al In­sur­ance Prop­er­ty De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd (Nipdec).

"We have been dis­cussing this is­sue ac­tive­ly with Nipdec for the bet­ter part of two months. So com­ing ear­ly Jan­u­ary, there­abouts, we recog­nised there may be a pos­si­ble fail­ure of the Chi­nese mar­ket," he said.

In light of In­dia's de­ci­sion, the CMO said he would be meet­ing with Nipdec and sup­pli­ers to­day "to work out the lo­gis­tics and get the sup­pli­ers to as­sist us in bring­ing in from al­ter­na­tive mar­kets if needs be."

The CMO was not able to in­di­cate ex­act­ly how many and which med­i­cines cur­rent­ly be­ing used in the coun­try would be af­fect­ed by In­dia's de­ci­sion be­cause he could not re­call the lo­gis­ti­cal par­tic­u­lars at the time. How­ev­er, he ex­plained that for the past two years the min­istry had iden­ti­fied pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary sup­pli­ers for their drugs and this should help them mit­i­gate some of the ef­fects of the re­stric­tion.

"That's what the meet­ing is about, to ac­tu­al­ly phys­i­cal­ly go through all the items and see which ones are pri­mar­i­ly and sec­on­dar­i­ly from those ar­eas where we are hav­ing the short­ages and then see if we can get al­ter­na­tive sup­plies. We're then look­ing at the na­tion­al stock and stock al­ready in the RHAs (Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ties) to see which ones are the crit­i­cal items in terms of pri­or­i­ty," Paras­ram said.