KANNUR: The coronavirus induced lockdown has affected the sale of allopathy medicines in Kerala. While the people of Kerala used to spend around 1000 crores per month on medicines alone, the sale has reduced by around Rs 500 crores in the last two months. It must be noted that around 13500 private medical shops and Karunya, Neethi medical shops that come under the government remained open during the lockdown period.

According to sources, there has been a reduction in demand for general, dental, allergy and child health medicines. On the other hand, medicines for heart diseases, blood pressure, diabetes continue to be on high demand even during the lockdown period. While the sale of inhalers used by asthma patients has reduced to 25%, antibiotic medicines, which usually does a business of Rs 10 crore per month, only managed to generate Rs one and a half crore in the last month.