Roberto Tobia, president of Federfarma Palermo, was reconfirmed national secretary of Federfarma in the team of president Marco Cossolo. Tobias was the councilor with the most votes by the assembly and, overall, he is the most voted in the history of the pharmacists’ union. “I will continue immediately – Tobia declared – my commitment to support the role of the pharmacy as the first territorial garrison of proximity at the service of citizens in the context of the National Health Service. Many steps forward have already been made in favor of the ‘pharmacy of services’ project and the challenge for the next three years will also be to make the pharmacy sustainable in the drug dispensing activity and in the provision of increasingly advanced and innovative services . In addition to the objective of obtaining the renewal of the agreement, which has now expired for too many years, for which Federfarma is committed to developing an effective dialogue with the government and the institutions”.
“The social role of the pharmacist – continues Tobias – also includes attention to aspects of the appropriateness of treatments. And in this sense, in recent months I have launched a commitment, at national and European level, to counter the sad phenomenon of antibiotic resistance, that is, the abuse of antibiotics which over time causes bacteria to become resistant to the effects of drugs. This is the new epidemic, because it already causes an average of 220 confirmed cases per day in Italy of deaths from hospital infections resistant to treatment.
“The situation – underlines Tobias – is very worrying. In fact, according to the latest Aifa data updated to 2021, in Italy there is at least one prescription for antibiotics a year for three out of ten adults, four out of ten children, five out of ten over 85 subjects, with inappropriate use of these drugs which Aifa identifies in 24% of cases. In Sicily – this is the alarm raised by Tobias – there is the greatest consumption of antibiotics in the country: the AIFA tables here reveal an average consumption of 15 doses per day per thousand inhabitants of antibiotics in general, which rises to 19, 7 doses per day per thousand inhabitants of systemic antibiotics. Given that, if multiplied by four million inhabitants, it gives us the ‘monstrel’ figure of 80,000 doses a day. And there is an increase above the national average in the consumption of third and fourth generation cephalosporins, fluoroquinonenes and, above all, broader spectrum antibiotics”.
“Another phenomenon to pay attention to – concludes Tobias – is that of the increase in the consumption of psychotropic drugs, especially among the youngest and women, with a constant average increase of 2% per year from 2017 to today, which has risen to 3 % during the lockdown. A study by the Cnr calculates that in 2022 the use of psychotropic drugs in Italy, with or without a prescription, affected 8.5 million people aged between 18 and 84, especially women. The most dangerous aspect is that more and more people turn to alternative channels on the web for purchases where they find fake pharmacies that do not provide any guarantee and counterfeit products that can be highly harmful to health”.