IMSS responded to Latinus' report on expired drugs: “These are wrong conclusions”

The Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) denied that in the last three years more than 134 million pieces of medicines have expired, as mentioned in the report published by Latinus last Thursday, April 7.

In the program “Loret chapter 79″, it was announced that the IMSS recorded a loss of more than 18 billion pesos for these expired drugs, according to the report “Medicines in the trash: vaccines and drugs expire by 18 billion pesos”. In addition, according to Latinus on average 131 thousand pieces of medicine expired per day.

However, Social Security replicated this work in a video shared on its social networks and assured that the figures presented are incorrect. “The case of IMSS is NOT 134 million pieces of drugs expired in 3 years as Latinus assures,” he replied.

According to the IMSS, in that period 2,715 million medicines were supplied, of which only 0.76% had losses due to expiration, that is, 113 million expirations less than what was reported by Latinus.

On 21 October 2021, a request for information was received through the National Transparency Platform, requesting the following information: number of drugs that expired from 2015 to 21 October 2021 with their respective name, clinic, state, as well as the price of each drug charged by the agency .

In response to that request, an archived Excel database consisting of 43,163 records was delivered on 6 December. However, the calculations obtained with this information are erroneous, the IMSS said. “The sending of 2 files in Excel format is noted and that is where Latinus drew his conclusions. But it added badly”, is explained in the video.

According to IMSS, the figure obtained by Latinus reporters is not correct due to an overvaluation of inventories, since they added the column of “expired inventory” linearly month after month without discounting the initial inventories for each period, resulting in a sum 5 times greater than that of registered.

Another point that the IMSS denied has to do with the impact on the money that expired drugs had. According to Social Security, Latinus had in its possession a price catalog composed of 1,005 drug keys. Thus, according to his calculations, the loss exceeded 18 billion pesos, which Carlos Loret de Mola described as “criminal negligence”.

However, the unit in charge of Zoé Robledo explained that the IMSS “has mechanisms and systems for managing inventory inventories”. In addition, their suppliers are asked to present “lace letters”, through which they undertake to replace products in case they expire at no additional cost. Thanks to this scheme, 254 million pesos have been recovered, said the IMSS.

“Latinus had all the information he requested from the IMSS and did not know, could not or did not want to analyze it in a professional way, presenting his audience with ill-calculated data and erroneous conclusions as real information,” the Institute said, adding that the dissemination of its data affects the reputation of its 215,000 workers.

It should be noted that the World Health Agency makes recommendations on acceptable losses due to expiration below 1% of the total, so that IMSS has recorded 0.24% less than established in the last three years.

So far, Latinus and Carlos Loret de Mola have not responded to the IMSS video.

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