Day: March 1, 2023

Eli Lilly will cut prices for some older insulins later this year and immediately give more patients access to a cap on the costs they pay to fill prescriptions.

The moves announced Wednesday promise critical relief to some people with diabetes who can face thousands of dollars in annual costs for insulin they need in order to live. Lilly’s changes also come as lawmakers and patient advocates pressure drugmakers to do something about soaring prices.

Lilly said it will cut the list prices for its most commonly prescribed insulin, Humalog, and for another insulin, Humulin, by 70% or more in the fourth quarter, which starts in October.

List prices are what a drugmaker initially sets for a product and what people who have no insurance or plans with high deductibles are sometimes stuck paying.

A Lilly spokeswoman said the current list price for a 10-milliliter vial of the fast-acting, mealtime insulin Humalog is $274.70. That will fall to $66.40.

Likewise, she said the same amount of Humulin currently lists at $148.70. That will change to $44.61.

Lilly CEO David Ricks said Wednesday that his company was making the changes to address issues that affect the price patients ultimately pay for its insulins.

He noted that discounts Lilly offers from its list prices often don’t reach patients through insurers or pharmacy benefit managers. High-deductible coverage can lead to big bills at the pharmacy counter, particularly at the start of the year when the deductibles renew.

“We know the current U.S. health care system has gaps,” he said. “This makes a tough disease like diabetes even harder to manage.”

Patient advocates have long called for insulin price cuts to help uninsured people who would not be affected by price caps tied to insurance coverage.

Lilly’s planned cuts “could actually provide some substantial price relief,” said Stacie Dusetzina, a health policy professor at Vanderbilt University who studies drug costs.

She noted that the moves likely won’t affect Lilly much financially because the insulins are older, and some already face competition.

Lilly also said Wednesday that it will cut the price of its authorized generic version of Humalog to $25 a vial starting in May.

Lilly also is launching in April a biosimilar insulin to compete with Sanofi’s Lantus.

Ricks said that it will take time for insurers and the pharmacy system to implement its price cuts, so the drugmaker will immediately cap monthly out-of-pocket costs at $35 for people who are not covered by Medicare’s prescription drug program.

The drugmaker said the cap applies to people with commercial coverage and at most retail pharmacies.

Lilly said people without insurance can find savings cards to receive insulin for the same amount at its InsulinAffordability.com website.

The federal government in January started applying that cap to patients with coverage through its Medicare program for people 65 and older or those who have certain disabilities or illnesses.

President Joe Biden brought up that cost cap during his annual State of the Union address last month. He called for insulin costs for everyone to be capped at $35.

Biden said in a statement Wednesday that Lilly responded to his call.

“It’s a big deal, and it’s time for other manufacturers to follow,” Biden said.

Aside from Eli Lilly and the French drugmaker Sanofi, other insulin makers include the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk.

Representatives for both Sanofi and Novo Nordisk said their companies offer several programs that limit costs for people with and without coverage.

Source: Voice of America

Locally sourced, WFP-supported home-grown school meals take the spotlight at high-level African Union event.

1 March 2023, Elizabeth Bryant

Green shoots of promise are pushing up from the conflict-scarred earth of Darfur, in western Sudan. Literally.

Primary schools are growing potatoes. tomatoes and spinach on government-allocated land. The vegetables are chopped, simmered and stirred, then spooned into students’ plates at mealtimes.

“When children are on holiday, the teachers sell the harvests to buy things like schoolbooks,” says Hameed Nuru, a former World Food Programme (WFP) country director in Sudan, who today heads WFP’s Africa Union Global Office in Addis Ababa. “And now you see kids getting into agriculture.”

The paybacks of WFP-supported home-grown school meals —sourced from local smallholder farmers and school gardens like those in Sudan— will be highlighted pn Wednesday (March 1) during high-level talks in Addis Ababa and Marrakech, Morocco, when African heads of state and ministers mark the 8th African Day of School Feeding.

Today, home-grown school feeding reaches 66 million children in 54 African countries. Almost every plateful — or 84 percent of the home-grown programmes — is funded by domestic budgets. Recent disruptions to African economies add traction to the movement and the need to think local— especially in a continent where farming remains a top source of income and jobs, particularly for women.

“Africa has seen itself become more vulnerable because of the COVID-19 lockdowns and now the Ukraine crisis” that sent global food prices soaring last year, Nuru says. “This has shone a new light on home-grown school feeding and the need to significantly enhance it, so we can reduce our vulnerability in the future.”

Snowball effect

Key findings from a new WFP study show home-grown school meals help to fight hunger, vitamins and minerals deficiency, anemia and obesity. They improve school enrolment, help build local resilience, and when the food is grown sustainably, can play a key role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Home-grown meals also help to educate a new generation of leaders.

But along with successes, the latest findings also show the share of school-aged children receiving school meals in Africa—both home-grown and sourced elsewhere — shrunk modestly in recent years: to 31 percent in 2022, down from 33 percent in 2020. The decline underscores the need to redouble school feeding efforts — a call that resonates with many African leaders, WFP’s Nuru says.

“Heads of states and ministers see the benefits as an investment,” Nuru adds, noting a number of high-level officials ate WFP school meals as children.

“They know what it’s like to go to school hungry and to get a meal,” he says. “That’s what pushed them on.”

Indirectly, home-grown school meals deliver another tangible payback. Africa’s Gross Domestic Product could be two-and-a-half times higher if health and education benchmarks were met, according to WFP’s upcoming State of School Feeding report, which will be published later this month.

Already, heads of state in countries like Rwanda, Senegal and Benin have put funds and political clout behind school feeding in their countries, in what Nuru likens to a snowball effect.

“It’s getting bigger and bigger,” he says. “More countries are joining in.“

Local communities are the first to benefit — especially when school food is grown at home.

“You’re creating a whole ecosystem in which teachers and parents come together to plant, and where you have local procurement which stimulates the local economy,” Nuru says. “Because it’s often the parents—in most cases the mothers— who are the ones supplying or cooking the food in schools. It’s a complete cycle.”

Tailored guidelines

Last year, WFP and the African Union launched new guidelines to help governments and teachers roll out home-grown school meals on their own, offering a mix of options to fit budgets they can afford. The guidelines include the types of food to use, how to source it and how to get political buy-in to the meals programmes.

At the Mantapala refugee settlement in northern Zambia, the home-grown meals are a boost for young students from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose parents sometimes struggle to feed their families.

“We have observed that more school children do not attend class during the days they are not given meals,” says local primary school head teacher Kasanda Chalawe.

Nuru considers his native Botswana a ‘gold standard’ for home-grown school feeding. The country has been running its own programme for decades. Today, primary students eat not one but two home-grown meals every school day.

“This has really changed people’s outlook and productivity,” he says.

But other countries are catching up, especially when it comes to home-grown school feeding.

“I think within the next 10 years, African countries will be doing it on their own,” Nuru says. “Which is wonderful, because WFP can then step back and move to the next phase of what we need to do in Africa.”

Source: World Food Programme

CONTEXT

Some regions of West and Central Africa (WCA) are faced with several layers of vulnerability resulting, among others, from weak state presence and capacity, limited access to basic services, struggling economies, slow-onset and rapid impacts of climate change, exponential demographic growth, rising urbanization, and general insecurity due to the presence of communal conflicts and the expansion of Non-State Armed Groups (NSAGs). In this context, weak governance systems and growing insecurity leave local populations to compete for dwindling natural resources, thereby placing further strain on social cohesion and undermining peaceful coexistence within and between communities. This is especially the case with respect to transhumance.

Cross-border transhumance is a longstanding traditional pastoral practice in Africa where herders migrate seasonally with their livestock in search of grazing land. In the Sahel and coastal countries of West Africa, a region characterized by long dry seasons, livestock mobility is an important livelihoods adaptation to increase resilience to climatic and economic vulnerabilities and risks. Transhumance is also a highly productive economic activity upon which both mobile and sedentary communities depend for food and income, while also serving as an important driver for regional integration and the strengthening of inter-community ties.

However, this practice has recently come under significant stress, threatening stability across the region. Historically, transhumance has been relatively peaceful, but climate change and environmental stresses have shifted migratory routes and seasonal migrations, resulting in a steady rise in tensions between farmer and herder communities, often linked to mounting competition for scarce natural resources. Faced with increasingly unpredictable rainfall patterns, communities are struggling to find suitable pastures or fertile agricultural land. Consequently, pre-existing cleavages have increasingly escalated into violent conflict when transhumant herds encroach onto unharvested fields, or when farmers sow their crops in designated transhumant corridors. Amidst growing communal tensions, there is a clear need for more inclusive and effective governance of shared resources to help maintain and restore social cohesion. Moreover, stronger, more capacitated governance, will also reduce the space for armed groups to capitalize on frustrations among aggrieved communities, which amplifies violence in an already vulnerable region.

Source: International Organization for Migration