By NATION REPORTER
ESSENTIAL drugs looted from public hospitals are being sold on the black market at ridiculous prices.
Patients have lamented that unless the rampant theft in health facilities is plugged, it may lead to more patients dying.
Dialysis patients told the Daily Nation that most drugs missing in hospitals were available on the black market at ridiculous prices.
But Ministry of Health spokesperson, Abel Kabalo said the country had run out of dialysis consumables because of the disturbance in the supply chain caused by the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The patients said hundreds of units of the dialysis consumables may have been stolen because they were the ones being sold on the black market.
They said the reported shortage of dialysis consumables at major hospitals in the country including the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka may have been caused by sabotage and weakness in the distribution of materials to patients.
The patients called on Government to institute investigations to plug the pilferage which has led to loss of life and paints a very bad picture of the country.
“Pilferage contributed to the unexpected shortage of materials apart from the reported problems at the Ministry of Health purchasing unit,” one of the patients said.
The patients said that the government must immediately implement stringent controls so that another crisis does not arise after restoration of supplies.
The revelation of suspected sabotage comes after an outcry from the chairman of the Kidney Foundation of Zambia that the lives of many patients on dialysis had been lost due to a shortage caused by government’s failure to supply consumables for the vital treatment.
Further investigations revealed that some patients had accumulated a supply of the consumables in excess of what they required for their treatment and they are now selling the same at below the supply cost.
A Daily Nation reporter who visited dialysis Ward CO23 at UTH found many patients waiting ready to be dialyzed in contrast with the earlier reports that operations in the ward had come to a standstill.
The minister of Health Dr Jonas Chanda faced a barrage of attacks two weeks ago following his statement in Parliament that government had supplied enough dialysis consumables and he was accused of telling lies.
Meanwhile, Dr Kabalo said in an interview that the pandemic has greatly affected the rate at which the renal supplies were produced as a number of companies closed as a result.
“Those reports are not true, what has happened with the Covid-19 pandemic is that there has been a disturbance in the supply chain across the board including renal consumables,” he said.
He said that the supply chain of various supplies including renal supplies is not immune to the effects of the pandemic and has since been badly affected.
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