Brussels plans on giving Malta a three-year reprieve from medicines import rules, to help ease the pressure of Brexit on local distributors. 

The European Commission on Friday announced proposals to ensure the continued supply of medicines from the UK to Malta, Cyprus and Ireland. 

If implemented, Malta will benefit from a number of derogations, exemptions. for a three-year period to help importers. 

For that period, medicines from the UK will not require manufacturing authorisations to be allowed into the country.

Medicines arriving in Malta from the UK will also not need to be batch tested again if they have already been tested. 

The plan will have to be approved by the European Parliament and EU leaders within the European Council before it is implemented. 

Malta has historically relied on imports of medicines from the UK - an arrangement that the UK's exit from the EU brought into doubt. 

The UK is now considered a third country by the EU and is no longer part of the single market for pharmaceuticals.

The issue hit the headlines in August, when Malta's medicine cabinet first started running low, with supplies of some medicines reportedly dwindling.   

At the time, the Chamber of Small and Medium Enterprises had said that household names like migraine-relief medication Solpadeine and eye drops like Timolol, Cosopt and Travatan had run out and that supplies of generics such as Thyroxine were running low. 

EU to give Malta special exemptions 

According to the Commission's plan, the three-year exemption period will give operators more time to adapt to the realities of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic.  

In the meantime, work will continue to develop a "long-term permanent solution", it said. 

A number of other amendments to the rules, already introduced earlier this year, have also been extended until the end of 2022.  

Government sources said this matter had been a top working priority for the health ministry in recent months. 

Stella Kyriakides, European Commissioner for Health and Food Safety, said the proposals were the fruit of in-depth discussions. 

“We all know how crucial the continuous supply of medicines are for hundreds of thousands of patients in Northern Ireland, but also in Cyprus, Ireland and Malta, whose markets are historically dependent on medicines from the UK," she told reporters on Friday morning.