EDITORIAL COMMENT: Pharmaceutical industry can be rebuilt

The Herald

The rebuilding, and then the expansion of Zimbabwe’s pharmaceutical industry and the manufacture of a wide range of medical products, and for that matter an effective range of things like shampoo and personal hygiene products, seems to be essential both to contain costs and to ensure supplies.

At one stage we had a fairly sophisticated industry. This had started very modestly. Pharmacists, the people who ran what used to be called chemist’s shops, used to mix up many of the very limited range of medicines when a patient brought in the doctor’s prescription.

It was far less counting out pills or capsules, and far more even pressing their own pills with a little machine. The pharmacist would have the bottles and boxes of active ingredients, plus inert filler material, and prepare the doses.

There were advantages to doing this in bulk for some medicines and as pharmaceutical scientists around the world discovered and refined thousands of new medications many of these had to be made up in factories rather than in a shop.

With the major import substitution drive after UDI the modest industry in Zimbabwe took wing and a small group of large companies started limiting imports for a wide range of medicines to the active ingredients, and then making up the pills and capsules and mixtures locally.

This was a very high precision business, since often we were talking about minute traces of the active ingredient and the dose in each tablet had to be precise.

The necessary machinery was bought and the necessary quality control, at a very high level, was put in place. This cut the import bill considerably and frequently allowed a lower price in Zimbabwe for what was a generic medication with many of the costs local.

The major company would, for example, buy the active antibiotic in 100kg lots. Since an average dose might be just 5 milligrams, a tiny pinhead if made up as a tablet without filler, the company would mix precise amounts of the antibiotic with precise, and larger amounts, of inert filler material, some of which could be produced locally, and then press out the tablets or fill the capsules in a suitable machine and pack the final product, if necessary in blister packs.

This process was considerably expanded over the years, right into the first two decades of independence, and was seen as a major way of controlling the foreign currency element in medication, which in turn in those days ensured it was available and that its price was not pegged to the conversion rate, since perhaps only 20 percent or so of the costs were in foreign currency.

Then came hyperinflation and dollarisation, and the industry collapsed.

There was, we agree, already the problem that machinery wears out and that new techniques are invented, and the companies were not adequately capitalised to replace what they had, but once the market started turning to near total imports the chance of a rebuild without a major policy at central Government level was almost nil.

Not all medication could be made up locally. Sometimes there was a special process; sometimes the active ingredient was still under patent; sometimes there were just two few patients.

The system worked well when there were tens of thousands of patients a year, preferably hundreds of thousands, and the active ingredients were generic drugs off patent where a respectable supplier was happy to sell in bulk.

The creation of the essential drugs list, around 100 drugs that were needed in more than 90 percent of treatments, gave a huge boost to the industry.

If those 100 drugs could be made locally, or at least mixed and packed locally, the vast bulk of medication required by any doctor, clinic or hospital could be at the very least in local packaging, and quite often a lot more local input was possible.

Besides this we had a flourishing industry for a range of other medical products and personal products, and these were definitely cheaper than the imports and usually just as good.

So a lot of basic medical equipment was made in Zimbabwe, with one post-independence firm taking the lead.

Again it was not everything, but if the average clinic was supposed to have one then the market was large enough to make local manufacture viable, and the pricing was good because export markets were built up, the Zimbabwean company able to compete with South African and overseas suppliers on both quality and price.

We talk a lot about how around 80 percent of the products on shop shelves these days are made in Zimbabwe. And so they are.

But when you move into the supermarket aisles where shampoos, deodorants, the sort of specialist hair care and skin care products that so many want or need, are stocked finding something with a Zimbabwean address on the bottle, or a Zimbabwean price, is impossible or nearly impossible.

This group of products, along with fancier alcohol brands, seems to dominate the missing 20 percent.

Yet we used to make a wide range, sometimes under licence for a global brand, and sometimes using standard ingredients in a total local product.

As with other industries, hyperinflation damaged the manufacturers and dollarisation killed them. Unlike some others they never recovered and newcomers have not arisen.

This is a pity. Competition is useful, and import bans as free trade areas are set up are impossible, but Zimbabwean consumers have become a lot more price conscious in recent years and would probably welcome products that meet their quality concerns at a price they can afford.

In all these sort of things, medicines that we need to recover from illness or even escape death, medical equipment that works well so we can be treated, and products that we spread over our bodies need to start with superb quality.

Some have the Medicines Control Authority of Zimbabwe ensuring this; others have to build their reputation. But we did it once and can do it again.

The final step will be the actual manufacture of the active medical ingredients. This will possibly only be possible for the most common medications, since economy of scale is vital.

India can dominate that market because of its huge population. But building up our own capacity will be useful, and that capacity will also allow development of other products, some of which we can export.

No Byline Policy

Editorial Guidelines

Corrections Policy

Source