THE Malaysian Medical Association (MMA) has advised the public against panic buying and unnecessarily hoarding medications that are not immediately needed.
This is in response to the recent shortage of certain medicines in the market which, according to MMA president Dr Koh Kar Chai, is not a new phenomenon as countries around the world are emerging from lockdown measures and economic activities are gradually resuming.
“Coupled with an unprecedented amount of demand for common medication brought on by the high incidence rate of the Omicron variant, many pharmaceuticals – both manufacturers and distributors alike – were caught off guard,” he said.
“The industry responded by placing higher orders for products from the manufacturers overseas while in the case of local manufacturers, they scrambled to increase their manufacturing capacities, which are also dependent on raw materials sourced from other countries.”
According to Dr Koh, as this is a worldwide problem, imports of both the finished products as well as the raw materials are also affected.
“Local manufacturers are limited by their capacity to ramp up production. It is not a simple matter to increase the production just to address the shortfall of supplies in the market,” he remarked.
“Raw materials aside, manufacturing plants are built to certain specifications, which may not allow any sudden and massive increase in the rate of production.”
Moving forward, Dr Koh expressed his hopes for a correction in the supply and demand situation of pharmaceuticals in the Malaysian market soon.
“If uncorrected, even supply of other previously unaffected medications will be disrupted. An advice to the public is to not panic buy and unnecessarily hoard medication which are not immediately needed to avoid aggravating the situation,” he said. – June 2, 2022
