Rarely does a week go past without a further addition to the already monumental corpus of literature on pharmaceutical policy. Cancer medicines and particularly NICE-related issues in policies and access to cancer drugs have now become the major news item for the UK media, adding fuel to an already flammable mixture of pharmaceutical industry and politics. In the heat of these ongoing debates, however, serious policy issues of cancer drug access, affordability, and usage remain ever present. The most recent addition to this policy debate has attempted to look into the extent and causes of international variations in drug usage in 14 countries with 14 different categories of drugs. This complex study used data supplied by a consulting company, IMS Health, and the manufacturers themselves. Data for drug usage were delivered as a country ranking or as a percentage of a European average made up of different combinations of countries, or as both. Overall, the UK ranked twelfth, but this method of ranking drug usage hid major variation. For example, for cancer drugs launched between 6 and 10 years ago,the UK was ranked ninth in usage but, for some individual drugs such as alemtuzumab, we were ranked first.
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