Tamiflu shipment arrives in Ukraine

Late this evening, a shipment of 300,000 doses of Tamiflu arrived at Kyiv’s Borypil Airport. It was send directly from the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche to the Ministry of Health of Ukraine.

"Never in the history of Ukraine has such a large shipment been organized within two days, two weekend days. Banks don’t work on these days and Ukraine’s word was taken and a multi-million dollar shipment was shipped under our guarantee. We didn’t unload this shipment until we signed the agreement identifying the Ministry of Health as the recipient," Foreign Minister Petro Poroshenko said while receiving the shipment in Boryspil.

According to him, the purchase agreement for Tamiflu was signed between the Cabinet of Ministers and Roche without any intermediaries, thus allowing the government to save 140 million UAH from the State Budget of Ukraine.

According to the agreement, the price for one pack of Tamiflu will be 67 hryvnias.

The Tamiflu medicine (its international non-patented name is Oseltam) is the only flu treatment and prevention medicine effective against the A H1/N1 virus. Its license is owned by a Swiss pharmaceutical company.

The medicine impedes the spread of group A and B of the flu virus. Tamiflu significantly decreases clinical manifestations of flu infections, alleviates the severity of the illness and lowers the frequency of the flu virus’ complications in those who require antibiotics.

Tamiflu could also be used to prevent the flu virus from penetrating the body. It decreases the sickness rate by 92% among people who have had contact with people who are ill, and in clinical trials it was successful by 76% with people who’ve experienced a flu outbreak. The medicine can be used in particular by children aged one year and older.