Health Policy Watch
High cost has prevented some cancer drugs from being included in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) updated Essential Medicines List (EML) and Essential Medicines for List Children (EMLc) released on Wednesday.
These include “patented, highly-priced” treatments for lung and breast cancer.
“With the cancer medicines, we are facing now an issue where we have a very high burden of disease and very expensive, highly-priced medicines,” said Dr Benedikt Huttner, secretary of the expert committee that advises the WHO on the EML.
“For some of the medicines [cost] was one of the factors leading the expert committee not to recommend them currently,” Huttner told a WHO global press conference.