New Partnership aims to bolster medical infrastructure and knowledge on rare illnesses.
Rabat – The Moroccan Minister of Health, Anass Doukkali, has launched a partnership with Sanofi Aventis Maroc, one of the country’s biggest operators in the pharmaceutical sector.
The agreement, signed on Tuesday July 16th, aims to aid people living with rare illnesses by widening the range of services available to them, and educating the moroccan medical community on the problems they face.
This public-private partnership is set to last through the next three years. It aims to improve the existing medical infrastructure by launching specialized centers for these patients at major university hospitals.
In addition to this, the plan involves creating a national registry for rare diseases in order to better track and predict their instances. Through this, the initiative aims to reach a more efficient allocation of medical and financial resources . The registry is set to be in place by 2020.
The initiative also seeks to train and inform over 450 moroccan medical professionals so that they may be better able to recognize and treat these illnesses. Rare illnesses can often go misdiagnosed, to the detriment of patients’ health and finances.
Treatment of rare and neglected illnesses is often extremely costly, due to both their medical complexity and the lack of demand for treatment resulting in poor economies of scale for manufacturers. Thus, a heavy burden falls on patients and their families. However, Moroccan civil society has stepped up in recent years in order to help the over eight thousand Moroccans living with these illnesses.
