President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s solution was to outfit a big warehouse on the outskirts of Mexico City to centralize a supply and send it to hospitals throughout the country.
Desperate parents blocked traffic at the Mexico City airport last year, holding up a banner reading: “There isn’t any chemotherapy, treatment or medicines, have some empathy and sensitivity.”
But in Mexico, that has led to contamination of the vials, triggering outbreaks of injection-induced meningitis in two Mexican states that have killed dozens of people — including some Americans who sought treatment at clinics in the border city of Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Texas.
The fake medicine trade is so common, and so lucrative in Mexico because patients or their relatives are often told by doctors to buy medications at private drug stores when they are unavailable at government hospitals.
Angry at what he claimed were inflated profits made by drug distributors and importers, the president simply cut the private companies out and decided the government should directly buy all medications.
Because the government did not have much infrastructure, contacts or experience in such a massive effort, López Obrador signed an agreement with the World Health Organization to help Mexico in purchasing.
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