Grave shortage of medicine for epilepsy care amid COVID-19 lockdown
CHENNAI: After medicines for epilepsy were delivered to a two-year-old boy in Chennai from Bengaluru with the help of social media, a lot of people have come forward to share their plight in sourcing the same drug -- Sabril Vigabatrin.
“There are so many requests all over social media. I spoke to six people who require the same medicine. They tried every shop in their city, and failed. These six people alone require around 800 tablets,” says disability rights activist, Vaishnavi Jayakumar. Debasis Nayak, who helped procure the drug for the toddler, says he has been getting scores of such requests.
“People have been contacting me from Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai and Telangana,” he says.
“Some have already run out of stock, while some others are on the last strip. We are looking within the community to see if medicines can be shared.”
A man from Chennai who needs Sabril for his four-year-old daughter, says they have decreased the dosage.
“She has to use two tablets per day. But we have only one strip left. So we are giving her one tablet per day. We don’t know if it’s the right thing to do. We are scared if seizures will increase.”
In Twitter too, there are requests from all over the country for Sabril Vigabatrin.