World Diabetes Day | “To date, the national law for the protection of diabetic patients has no regulations”

A recent report from World Health Organization (WHO) revealed a worrying panorama: one in two people with diabetes type 2 (associated with being overweight and sedentary) who need insulin, cannot access it. Without the drug, patients are at increased risk for kidney failure, blindness, and lower limb amputation. Faced with this situation, and within the framework of World Diabetes Day, El Comercio spoke with the endocrinologist Segundo Seclén, president-elect of the Latin American Diabetes Association.

-The new WHO report on access to insulin is not encouraging at all. What factors are associated with this inaccessibility?

If you review the different health programs in Latin America, you will realize that most people have to buy insulin with their own money, since. Only some countries in the region have programs that do provide insulin to patients, such as Argentina, Chile and Brazil, especially to risk groups: children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes, who do not have their own insulin production. So, access to insulin is quite low and is based on public health policies.

-Does the Peruvian health system offer insulin to people who need it?

The Comprehensive Health Insurance (SIS). When they turn 18, these young people will no longer be able to receive it from the SIS, even though they need it for life. The situation also harms type 2 diabetes patients, since some of them require the drug as other drugs do not work. The inventors of insulin offered a patent for the product at no cost to the scientific community. However, the pharmaceutical industry progressively increased the price of the drug. Right now, for example,. Limited access to insulin is not being addressed by government health systems. You could estimate that only 20% of patients have access to insulin.

-In other words, each adult with diabetes has to see how they get the insulin they need so much to survive …

It’s reality. A patient can consume, depending on the doses, up to two or three vials of insulin, which. For middle-income families, this is a strong investment. In Peru, the WHO alert is being fulfilled and should be resolved. We have Law No. 28553, General Law for the Protection of People with Diabetes, which was enacted in 2005 and expanded in 2018 (Law No. 30867), but. The law has three main articles: the creation of a national diabetes prevention and control program, which should be implemented above all at the primary level; the reduction of duties and taxes on diabetes products entering the country; that a general education be given for all patients with the disease. Those three articles have not been carried out because the regulations of the law have not yet been published. We are currently pushing, together with other associations, for this regulation to be approved and promulgated. We will insist that this issue be resolved and insulin is available to all patients who require it. If type 1 diabetes patients do not take insulin, they will die.

-In June 2020 a draft regulation for this law was published. However, since then there is no progress …

That’s how it is. This draft regulation is the one that has remained in “stand by”. The style of how regulations and laws are published in Peru is quite peculiar, since it does not involve interested persons in the discussion. It is assumed that a regulation of this type, for a law of such importance, but that has not happened, there is no real participation of these groups. In Peru, around two million people have diabetes and 23% of the population has prediabetes, that is, glucose levels above normal.

-In the face of health problems you cannot act slowly …

Today, on World Diabetes Day, I would ask the Minister of Health, Hernando Cevallos, to convene scientific societies, patient societies and health officials at a table to sit at a table and resolve at once the problem quickly, especially since the population with diabetes has been one of the most affected during the pandemic.