Pharmacy

Due to medication shortages, more pharmacists are returning to their laboratories and offering an additional service in their pharmacies that is often overlooked: the preparation of galenic formulations.

A pharmacy located in the Sykies district of Thessaloniki, in northern Greece, was burglarized in the early hours of Wednesday.

According to police, the culprit broke through brick and concrete walls by digging a tunnel to gain access to the pharmacy and stole an unknown amount of cash.

No suspects have been identified yet, and no arrests have been made.

27,650 packs of Ozempic are provided for Bulgarian patients. This quantity of the medicinal product will be available in the country at the beginning of next week - on March 21. This was announced today by the Minister of Health, Dr. Asen Medzhidiev.

In 1937, an American drug company introduced an elixir to treat strep throat - and unwittingly set off a public health disaster. The product, which had not been tested in humans or animals, contained a solvent that turned out to be toxic. More than 100 people died.

Pharmacists in Attica have announced a four-hour work stop on Wednesday in support of the strike called in the aftermath of the Tempe railway disaster.

Pharmacies will close from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., the Attica Pharmaceutical Association said.

Their counterparts in Thessaloniki said they would strike from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Some 3.1 million boxes of syrup-form antibiotics used in childhood infections, which have experienced difficulties in supply, have been supplied to the market as of Jan. 30, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca.

The recent shortage of drugs experienced by pharmacies across the country will be resolved in the coming weeks, as the production of drugs with high consumption will be increased significantly, Health Minister Fahrettin Koca has pledged.

Online sales by Greek pharmacies grew by 13% in 2022 compared with the previous year, totaling 271 million euros, Convert Group said in an annual industry report.

It showed that online pharmacies offered an average 41% discount in 2022, a rate unchanged from 2021.

New supplies of antibiotics and antivirals, which are missing from pharmacies in Bulgaria, are expected this week. In the coming days, the measure announced by the Minister of Health last week, according to which doctors and pharmacists will have access to information about missing and available drugs in wholesale warehouses, should also work.

Some of the medicines missing in the pharmacy network in Bulgaria - antibiotics and antiviral preparations - are arriving. New supplies are expected at the beginning of next week, said Arkadi Sharkov, a health economist from EKIP and an advisor to the Ministry of Health.