The National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) postponed the decision on the sale of self-tests in Brazil. The topic would be discussed at this Tuesday’s (19) meeting of the collegiate board, but was removed from the agenda.
When requesting the removal of the item, director Daniel Pereira argued that it is necessary to continue the “alignments” that the topic involves with the Ministry of Health.
“This process is an almost joint process, Anvisa and the Ministry of Health. We need another side, a policy related to this type of product, as it is a diagnosis of a notifiable disease. Considering the phase of these alignments, I request that the item be removed from the agenda.”
Understand
Last week, the agency’s CEO, Antonio Barra Torres, had already anticipated that negotiations for the commercialization of self-tests for dengue fever were underway between the ministry and Anvisa
“Dengue is a notifiable disease. Therefore, there needs to be a public policy generated by the Ministry of Health in this sense and that includes, even in the case of self-testing – which the citizen himself can carry out – a mechanism for monitoring systems to be notified, so that monitoring systems can be precisely to compute the cases throughout Brazil.”
Also last week, the ministry’s general coordinator of Public Health Laboratories, Marília Santini, confirmed negotiations with Anvisa on the topic.
“We had two meetings with Anvisa”, he said, detailing that the rapid test and the self-test are essentially the same device, with the first being conducted by a healthcare professional and the second, by the patient themselves.
The general coordinator recalled that, unlike the covid-19 scenario, in which self-testing helps to interrupt the transmission of the virus through isolation, dengue self-testing does not have this role, as the disease can only be transmitted through bites. of the female mosquito Aedes aegypti.
Tags: Anvisa postpones decision commercialization dengue selftests
