The pharmacist in Schöneberg seems desperate. “I’m sorry, but we only have one other type of medicine based on this active ingredient,” she says to a customer who had asked for a special painkiller: “And it wasn’t easy to get it.” Then she lists them , which medications are currently causing problems: painkillers, antibiotics, cardiovascular and blood pressure medications…
Scenes like this are now happening more often in Berlin pharmacies. “We actually have a lot of bottlenecks in medicines,” says the spokesman for the Berlin Pharmacists’ Association (BAV), Stefan Schmidt: “This is not a new phenomenon, but it has become more and more acute in recent years.”
BAV President Anke Rüdinger recently said in the RBB evening show that the supply bottlenecks did not result in supply bottlenecks, which was only due to the many pharmacists who took care of alternatives with a “considerable additional effort”. This is no different in Brandenburg. says the chairman of the state pharmacy association there, Olaf Behrendt: “In my pharmacy in Fehrbellin we are waiting for the subsequent delivery of at least 200 medicines. In order to still be able to supply our customers well, we are increasingly looking for other manufacturers or similar active ingredients.”
[If you want to have all the latest news live on your cell phone, we recommend our app, which you can download here for Apple and Android devices.] According to the pharmacists, the culprit for the situation is that many medicinal products as The active ingredients required for their manufacture are now mainly produced in China and India.
In the event of crises, massive disruptions to international supply chains can quickly occur. “Politics are really needed here,” says BAV spokesman Stefan Schmidt: At the same time, he warns against scaremongering: “So far, the patients have still been taken care of. So there is no reason to hoard medicines.”
