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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Updated July 27, 2023by Nick TaylorBarbara and I just came from a pharmacy near our hotel in Amsterdam, where I bought two two-gram tubes of Zovirax cream for 10 euros each. A Google search now shows a price just over $1,000. Even its generic version, acyclovir, costs around $800. And it’s prescription-only, not over-the-counter.So the outrage continues. We first discovered the price disparity when we visited Rome and stopped into a pharmacy in 2018. Then and now you can thank the American pharmaceutical industry and shameful Congressional inaction for a price many times higher at home than in Europe. You have to spend $10,000 in travel, (Some may do it cheaper, but still.) to save hundreds of dollars on a drug that long since lost patent protection but is jacked up artificially to keep the pharmacy fat cats from losing weight. We first spotted the problem and outlined it in this post. On vacation in Rome five years ago, I spied one of the green neon crosses that in Italy advertise a farmacia and walked in to ask if I could get a tube of acyclovir ointment. It was a shot in the dark. You need a prescription for acyclovir in the United States, but that’s not true everywhere. And at $700 for a 30-gram tube at my local CVS I thought, Why not?Photo by Elliot Brown via Flicker, Creative Commons LicenseThe woman at the counter turned to some drawers in the wall behind her, riffled through the stock, and produced a small box that contained a 2-gram tube of Zovirax-branded 5 percent acyclovir cream. How much was it?She smiled brightly. “Nine euros twenty. But if you buy three you get one for free.”My wife Barbara said my jaw dropped and my face brightened when I heard that. And so I walked out with 6 grams of acyclovir for my herpes outbreaks for less than 18.40 euros, or about $21.50. At home I would have paid $140, or a fifth of $700 for a fifth of 30 grams.Acyclovir, an anti-viral medication, is prescribed for the herpes simplex virus wherever it may appear: chicken pox, shingles and severe complications from Epstein-Barr viral infections.I’ve had genital herpes since a one-night stand in the 1970s. Treatment at the time was primitive. It involved lying on a table in a doctor’s office with an ultraviolet light shining on the affected area. If you imagine
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