Postcript Health care System

More than 70% of medicines consumed in Africa are imported, only Algeria, Morocco, Egypt and South Africa are able to produce enough drugs and medicines for the local market. Ethiopia is a model country for local investments and developed manufacturing capacity, offering increased access to quality assured medication. Generics are produced at very low costs, for many years mainly supplied by India and China. They are supposed to be as good as the original, sold a lot in Europe too, yet some patients are not as happy with these as with the original (in a few cases less effective and/or more side-effects, yet the concerned health insurances as a rule don't want to meet the extra costs). Generics represent a chance to make more necessary medication available to folks with little or no income. Manufacturing in Tunisia and local knowledge further reduces the costs.- The pharmacy industry justifies their high prices (in particular in Germany) with survey and development costs and tends to forget to mention their huge profits and money spent on advertising and lobbying works. Well they take what they can get. If you have the misfortune to suffer a rare illness, you may well discover that there is no suitable medicament on the market. This is not because it can't be developed, but rather that the pharmacy industry doesn't expect large profits in this case and therefore just isn't interested. On the other hand, whenever a representative of the pharmacy industry has a chance to discover, through natives, new healing herbs or plants, they tend "to forget" to offer even a minor share to the concerned natives. ( In some cases NGOs managed to explain the natives' rights.) - From time to time, in particular concerning more expensive imports, your dispensing chemists may not be able to sell the medication you require and suggest a different one, as his supplier didn't deliver what he ordered. With a bit of luck you can perhaps thus discover a new good product. Supply and demand don't always match, more expert planning could be helpful,  not just here. But to be fair, large improvements have been made since the revolution and this is likely to continue now that the number of tourists returning is rising.