Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
“A no-deal Brexit … is expected to have an immediate and drastic effect on supply chains” for medicines. From the pen of an op-ed writer, such language might seem alarmist. But this comes from a report published this week in the Lancet, a world-class scientific journal – and it should terrify you.
The scale of the problem is huge. You will know someone affected, even if you are not. NHS figures show that almost half the population regularly takes a prescribed medicine. And around 75% of the medicines the NHS uses come into the UK from the EU.
But what we don’t know is which medicines will be affected. The secretary of state for health, Matt Hancock, knows. The Commons health and social care select committee asked him to publish a list of the medicines and medical products for which his department had supply concerns. But despite the public interest, he refused, citing “commercial confidentiality”. And he’s muzzled suppliers with non-disclosure agreements so they can’t tell us either.
It’s not just drugs. The Medical Schools Council – the representative body for UK medical schools – gave evidence that 3.7 million people in the UK have been diagnosed with diabetes, yet less than 3% of insulin is manufactured in the UK. “Any disruption to the supply chain could have catastrophic consequences,” they added, before comparing a no-deal Brexit to the break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, when deaths from diabetes rose ten or twenty fold.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/27/tory-plans-no-deal-brexit-medical-shortages
The scale of the problem is huge. You will know someone affected, even if you are not. NHS figures show that almost half the population regularly takes a prescribed medicine. And around 75% of the medicines the NHS uses come into the UK from the EU.
But what we don’t know is which medicines will be affected. The secretary of state for health, Matt Hancock, knows. The Commons health and social care select committee asked him to publish a list of the medicines and medical products for which his department had supply concerns. But despite the public interest, he refused, citing “commercial confidentiality”. And he’s muzzled suppliers with non-disclosure agreements so they can’t tell us either.
It’s not just drugs. The Medical Schools Council – the representative body for UK medical schools – gave evidence that 3.7 million people in the UK have been diagnosed with diabetes, yet less than 3% of insulin is manufactured in the UK. “Any disruption to the supply chain could have catastrophic consequences,” they added, before comparing a no-deal Brexit to the break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, when deaths from diabetes rose ten or twenty fold.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/27/tory-plans-no-deal-brexit-medical-shortages
