News from the OECS as of
|
OECS member states get Tamiflu shipment
|
| Published on Thursday, July 23, 2009 | Email To Friend Print Version
|
CASTRIES, St LuciaThe OECS Secretariat has shipped supplies of a special antiviral medicine known as Tamiflu to all OECS Member States for combating the H1N1 or swine flu virus.
 |
Head of OECS PPS,
Francis Burnett |
The Secretariat’s Pharmaceutical Procurement Service (OECSPPS) purchased the medicines from a top quality generic supplier in India and distributed them to all OECS Member Countries.
The OECSPPS says twenty thousand Tamiflu tablets and two thousand bottles of the suspension for children were purchased as a proactive approach to help care for adults and children should they be infected by the H1N1 or swine flu virus. The total value is one hundred and six (106) thousand EC dollars.
Head of the OECSPPS Francis Burnett says the Tamiflu medication was purchased through an emergency fund established a few years ago: “This sum of money was extracted from our Disaster Fund. The OECS PPS allocated up to 300 thousand EC dollars for an emergency supply of medicines to safeguard public health in the OECS countries. So out of our Disaster Fund we decided to allocate one hundred and six thousand dollars for the procurement of the antiviral medicine Tamiflu.”
The World Health Organization has designated the H1N1 or swine flu outbreak a global pandemic and at least four OECS member countries to date have reported one or more cases of the swine flue virus: “We have been following the spread of the virus and once we recognize that more and more countries were being affected by the virus, we decided upfront to take the proactive approach and to purchase these medicines. We also had an approach by the Pan-American Health Orginzation PAHO who offered to procure some of the Tamiflu from the stockpile in Mexico and we decided to play our part to safe guard public health in the OECS Countries.”
The OECS PPS which purchases medicines in bulk for OECS Member States says the Tamiflu tablets are stocked at all government pharmacies in the OECS and are available only through a prescription. Tamiflu is the brand name of the medication for which the scientific name is Oseltamivir. | | | | Reads : 1003 | | | |
|
|
More news from the OECS...
|
