Cork mum Vera Twomey pleads with authorities to help get Ava’s medicine

Cork mother Vera Twomey is pleading with authorities to help bring the medicine needed for her daughter Ava to Ireland.

Ava has a severe form of epilepsy called Dravet’s Syndrome and, following a lengthy campaign by Ms Twomey, is prescribed a type of medicinal cannabis oil to treat her symptoms.

However, Ava’s family has to travel from Cork to Amsterdam every 12 weeks to fill her prescription.

Ava’s mother said that she is gravely concerned about how she will acquire Ava’s medicine amid the coronavirus outbreak and is urging authorities to try to bring the medicine here instead.

Air travel is being increasingly restricted as the disease spreads in Europe.

“We have to travel this week and I think at the weekend we began to realise that this is getting very serious,” said Ms Twomey.

She says that in Northern Ireland and the UK, there are arrangements so that a distribution company collects it on behalf of patients and distributes it locally.

However, despite requests for this to be done here, she says this has not been possible.

Ms Twomey spent much of today contacting politicians and authorities to see if anything can be done to try to arrange for Ava’s medicine to be brought here so that she doesn’t run the risk of contracting Covid-19 when travelling.

Ms Twomey says that she has been advised not to travel, but said that if alternative arrangements cannot be made, she will have little choice but to do so.

“We don’t want to get down to the last bottle of medication,” she said. “If the THC component of her medication regime is removed it is going to be catastrophic. She’ll go into freefall.

“If they don’t help me, I’ll have to travel — and if I travel, I could be exposing her to more danger.”