Some Nurofen and Perdolan medicines are temporarily out of stock in Belgian pharmacies, can we read on the farmaStatus.be website, an initiative of the Federal Agency for Medicines and Health Products (FAMHP) which collects information on the availability of medicines in Belgium.
Perdolan suppositories, marketed by the American company Johnson & Johnson Consumer, are out of stock until January 13. Children’s syrup is also temporarily unavailable, but should be back on pharmacy shelves by Friday.
Perdolan explains this shortage with a “increased demand“.
On the side of Nurofen (medicines manufactured by the British firm Reckitt Benckiser), we rather evoke a “late productionThis particularly concerns sugar-free syrup and soft chewable capsules for children, which will go on sale again on January 23 and March 20 respectively. The same brand children’s suppositories are also unavailable, but they will return to market from December 30.
“We are in a period of shortage because many people are sick at the moment,” notes Ann Eeckhout, spokesperson for the FAMHP. Manufacturers “may not have anticipated a wave of RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus) infections at the same time as the return of influenza and Covid“, she advances.
Furthermore, pharma remains a commercial sector. “These companies do not want to produce too much or too little“, she continues. And the production of drugs consists of a process “long and complex“, which implies that producers do not respond immediately to the (unexpected) growth in demand, can we read on pharmaStatus.be.
Last April, many pharmacies were already out of stock for several pediatric medicines due to the sudden multiplication of viruses.
However, the FAMHP wants to be reassuring: alternative treatments exist to treat patients “correctly and efficientlydespite these shortages.