Brussels, 27/04/2015 (Agence Europe) - In a backdrop to last week's informal Health Ministers' meeting in Riga, the respective Belgian and Dutch Health Ministers, Maggie De Block and Edith Schippers, announced that they had signed a memorandum for an agreement to carry out joint negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to obtain reimbursement on orphan medicines.
Minister De Block explained: “We will be able to get more for our patients suffering from rare diseases… Together, we will represent more patients and be able to negotiate a lower price”. She added that several companies had already said that they wanted to participate in the project. The advantage for them would be that they would only have to introduce a single dossier for the two countries, which would give them access to a greater number of patients.
The Dutch and Belgian ministers have been discussing these joint discussions with the pharmaceutical companies. The initiative will begin with a pilot project that the two ministers will subsequently evaluate. Belgium and the Netherlands are hoping that other member states will join this initiative, given that a number of ministers from other member states have already shown an interest in it.
Orphan diseases are rare diseases that affect fewer than 5 out of 100,000 people. There are around 8,000 orphan diseases for which there are barely 150 medicines available on the market. Around 30 million Europeans suffer from one of these 8,000 orphan diseases and given the shortage of medicines available on the market, these medicines are very expensive. (Isabelle Lamberty)