Islami Andolon holds protest rally in Sylhet

High medicine price
Low income families struggling to buy prescription drugs
Muhid Hasan
The low-income people are continuously losing their health affordability because of the growing price of essential drugs in the country.
Prices of almost all medicines have increased manifold silently to the misery of commoners some of whom skip lifesaving recipe to manage rising cost of living.
Due to the two rounds of medicine price hike in recent months by the Directorate General of Drug Administration (DGDA), the middle class and lower class people are in a dilemma whether to supply food to survive or to buy medicine for health.
Heath experts said that the drug companies are forcibly increasing the price of drugs with surplus value for the sake of increasing the dollar value in the international and domestic markets.
The pharmaceutical companies are delaying supply and increasing prices of the medicines to make windfall profits, they added.
However, for overall medicine price hike, the drug manufacturing companies identified major reasons including the devaluation of money against the USD, raw materials price hike and supply turbulence in global market, LC opening crisis.
In the last six months, the prices of these drugs have increased by 13-75 percent, according to the data of Consumers Association of Bangladesh (CAB). The price of paracetamol syrup for example alone has increased by 75 per cent.
Apart from this, the prices of medicines, including antibiotics, antacid, and medicines for high blood pressure and diabetes have increased from 13 to 33 percent, CAB Treasurer Md Munjur-e-Khoda Tarafdar informed.
Sadia Chowdhury, a housewife in city’s Kalabagan area, found cost of medicines that she used to buy for her mother-in-law every month go up by 20 to 100 per cent on the basis of brand and category.
Her family has to cut budget for kitchen market, compromising nutrition to her two school-going kids, to manage additional expenditures for medicines.
“Even price of saline ( Orsaline N and Tasty saline) went up by Tk 1.0 per piece,” the middle-aged woman laments.
Besides , cashing the crisis as the deadly outbreak of dengue across the country, lifesaving DNS saline, priced at Tk80-90, is currently being sold at up to Tk500, according to DNCRP officials.
Consumers have alleged that many pharmacies and shops are not selling the saline despite having it in stock in hopes of making profits.
The owner of a drug store in Mitford Hospital area, Shagor Shaha, told The New Nation that in the last several months, the price of medicine has been increasing constantly. Some of the drug stores take this as an opportunity which makes things worse.
More alarmingly, Bangladesh ranks 144th out of 145 countries in terms of out-of-pocket expenditure on health per capita as percentage of GNI per capita.
Health economics researcher at Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) Dr Abdur Razzaque said out-of-pocket expenditure on purchase of medicines would be escalating significantly following price hike of medicines.
Overhead costs of pharmaceutical companies and lack of regulations are among the major reasons for “irrational” price hike of medicines, he expressed.
“Medicine is essential goods. The government should monitor its prices cautiously,” he added, opposing arbitrary escalation of prices.
He notes that prices of only 117 medicines are controlled by the government, and those medicines price in here much higher than the abroad.