Azernews.Az

Providing people suffering from acute diseases with required medicine is challenging due to the fresh EU sanctions on Iran, the head of an Iranian charity said amid local media reports saying that medicine prices are rising and some medicine types are scarce due to the sanctions.

"We are feeling the shortage mostly for cancer and MS drugs," Fatemeh Hashemi, who heads Iran's Charity Foundation for Special Diseases, was quoted by the Tabnak website as saying.

"Of course, thalassemia and dialysis patients are also facing hardship. All this is rooted in the problems which have been caused by the sanctions against the banking sector and difficulties in transferring foreign currency," she said.

"The sanctions have targeted people. Many indications prove this. The most painful is the time when we see hardship of six million patients who are suffering from special diseases and their families who are grappling with these problems," Hashemi said, citing the grave impact of both the economic and non-economic sanctions on those people's lives.

On Monday, Iranian ISNA news agency quoted Mohammad-Hossein Hariri, an Iranian pharmacist, as saying that if officials do not pay attention to the production and imports of drugs, the country will face a crisis in the near future.

Regarding the rise in prices of drugs during the past three months, Hariri said domestically produced drugs are currently supplied to the market with a 15-20 per cent average price rise.

Prices of foreign medicine have also notably increased, he said, adding that some food supplements which are being imported are supplied to the market with a price hike ranging between 20 and 80 per cent.

On October 11, the Khabar Online website reported that production fell and the imports of drugs entered an "alarming phase", threatening special disease patients in particular. The country is facing a shortage of over 15 drugs for special disease patients, according to the report. The website quoted the head of the Iranian Thalassemia Society as saying that the drug deficit has led to the deaths of some patients.

On October 9 the Tehran-e Emrooz daily published a comprehensive report about the shortage of medicine for "over 20,000" thalassemia patients and long queues in front of drugstores.

Thalassemia patients have been consuming medicine less than the required amount for a couple of months, the newspaper said.

The EU and U.S. have imposed tough sanctions against Iran's banking and oil sectors as well as the financial system. Iran relies on the oil sector as the main source of income. It has been frequently said that the food and drug sectors are exempt from the sanctions. However, domestic and foreign sources have reported dire problems for importers of food and drugs due to the banking sanctions.

On April 3, Reuters published a report citing some goods -- mainly medicine and healthcare products, whose export to Iran had faced problems, although the U.S. Treasury had permitted exporting such products.

According to Reuters, U.S. firms from major drug makers like Merck & Co. to family outfits like Harrington's American Pulp & Paper Corp. are finding it hard to get paid even for medicines and other humanitarian exports explicitly allowed by the U.S. Treasury, according to officials, sanction lawyers and the companies.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced on October 5 that the Iranian people were under great pressures resulting from the sanctions.

Banking limitations have made it hard to export drugs to Iran, he said, adding that many pharmaceutical companies are disinclined to export medicines to Iran due to the money transfer problems.

In addition to the money transfer problems, the rise in prices of foreign currencies was another factor which contributed to the medicine price hike in Iran.