Press Review of the Week

23d January 2012

Mr. Djamel Ould Abbes, the Algerian Minister of Health, said during the opening speech of the Arab High Technical Commission for Medicines, that “in Algeria arab investments in medicines reached $380 million in 2011“, according to L’Expression. Jordan, with 34 per cent of investments, got the first place.

Algeria mainly relies on foreign providers (near $2 billion); as a consequence, the Ministry of Health announced the modernization of national production units, hoping to produce 70 percent of generic drugs by 2014. L’Expression reported that the Ministry will require, for each accreditation for foreign medicines on Algerian market, the possibility of an accreditation for national products on foreign markets. That is perhaps the reason why health professionals and pharmaceutical industry, according to El Watan, decided to launch this week a think tank on patients care and drug access.

Drug access is the crux of the matter in the debate about primary care in Maghreb. In Morocco, for instance, even if the experimentation of the full social coverage (RAMED) included 130.000 beneficiaries in the pilot region of Tadla-Azilal, with the aim to develop a national healthcare system of mandatory insurance, high prices of drugs for patient is a remaining issue, as noticed a report from the Parlementary Commission of Morocco in 2009.

The situation in public healthcare is changing. In Algeria, Pr. Farid Chaoui gave an interview in La Nation, interesting and  straightforward, about current healthcare system in the hands of lobbies since its construction without synergy planning during the 1990′s. The new Moroccan Minister of Health, El Hossein El Ouardi, in an interview in Le Soir les Echos, is evoking the RAMED and social inequalities : ”20 per cent of the richest population consume 56 percent of the care albeit the 20 percent of the poorest consume less than 3 percent of the care” and “40 percent of the patients with RAMED’s cards had to pay to have an access to hospital care in the region [of the RAMED experimentation]“. The objective of the Minister is to decentralize the decisions with more power to local representatives.

With Driss Temsamani lobbying, a Moroccan expatriated businessman in US, the Maghreb Growth Fund supports innovative North African projects in new technologies, energy and health with 25.000 dollars by project, reports Aujourd’hui. An opportunity for innovative technologies in health!