Cystic fibrosis patient Mandy Vella is in Mater Dei hospital and is desperate for medication to help her condition, her father Edwin Vella has said.

Edwin Vella shed light on his daughter’s deteriorating condition on Facebook, where he tagged Prime Minister Robert Abela, Deputy Minister Chris Fearne and Opposition Leader Bernard Grech in a post.

“At the moment my daughter is at Mater Dei Hospital again with a lung related problem due to Cystic Fibrosis. Her lungs are deteriorating and deteriorating fast”, he writes.

He asks the Maltese authorities to import Trikafta: a prescription medicine used for the treatment of Cystic Fibrosis. Although Trikaftka was approved by the European Union in August 2020, the medication still hasn’t made its way to Malta.

The Vella family have been waiting for the medication for seven months.

“Seven months of waiting and seven months of irreparable damage to her lungs”, writes Edwin Vella. “How much longer are we going to wait?”

26 year old Mandy Vella took to Facebook on 2 March 2021 to plead to the authorities to import the medication for her and others suffering from the condition in Malta.

In the post, she explained how she spoke first-hand to Prime MinisterAbela and the Malta Community Chest Fund about her condition and implored that the medicine be imported to Malta. She also said that President of Malta George Vella was writing a letter to the Prime Minister about her deteriorating condition.

Despite her efforts, she never heard back about the importation of the medicine to Malta.

“I feel I am being abused mentally and emotionally by the authorities, and also the more I wait for a response, the more harm is being done to my health”, she wrote in her Facebook post. “Every day my heart is broken, waiting to see if I will hear a positive response. What is truly going on here? I want a response before it is too late”.

This newsroom previously reached out to the Ministry of Health about the lack of Cystic Fibrosis medication in Malta, to which it said that the Government Formulary List Advisory Committee (GFLAC) is currently discussing adding the medication to the government formulary list.

“A group of novel medicines for Cystic Fibrosis has been licensed and authorised by the European Medicines Agency, however this does not mean automatic availability and entitlement in any EU country”, the ministry said. “However, it must also be pointed out that the licensing of these medications is fluid and the situation is changing constantly”.

The ministry had also said that “discussions were held with the consultants of these identified patients and a caring pathway has been drawn up”.