Iran medicine shortages worsened by war

Sanctions, currency volatility and long-running pressure on insurers have made medical treatment hard to access in Iran for years.

Now, the war launched by the US and Israel appears to have deepened the strain by disrupting regional supply routes, damaging parts of Iran's health infrastructure and adding fresh pressure to an already fragile pharmaceutical market.

The results are affecting everyday life for many Iranians: from patients searching multiple pharmacies for medicine to doctors watching people abandon prescriptions they can no longer afford.

Supply chains and sanctions

For a country like Iran, which depends on imported raw materials and foreign-made medicines for part of its pharmaceutical system, delays and higher transport costs quickly feed into domestic shortages and price rises.

Transport, however, is only part of the problem. Even when medicines are technically exempt from sanctions, banking and payment restrictions can still make procurement slow, complicated and expensive.

That financial choke point has affected Iran's pharmaceutical sector for years. In wartime, it becomes even more damaging. Rising prices, disrupted supply chains, damaged infrastructure and shrinking purchasing power are reinforcing one another.

Iranian officials have tried to project calm, arguing that strategic reserves and domestic production have prevented a full-scale collapse. But the picture described by patients, doctors and industry figures is more troubling.

Hadi Ahmadi, a spokesperson for the Iranian Pharmacists Association, has warned that the war could create new shortages in materials needed for pharmaceutical production, including aluminum and petrochemical inputs.

Even where medicine stock still exists, future manufacturing may become harder if industrial feedstocks and packaging materials grow scarce.

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Some patients are giving up

The impact is already visible in clinics and pharmacies. A general practitioner inside Iran told DW that some medicines have effectively disappeared since the war, while others seem to be available only intermittently or at sharply inflated prices.

A cardiologist in Iran told DW that prices have climbed so high that some patients simply stop buying the medicines they need.

One of his patients told DW that a pharmacy was keeping the anti-platelet drug Osvix in a safe. Drugs that used to be scarce are now technically available, the patient said, but so expensive that many people cannot buy them.

These may be individual accounts, but together they reflect a broader pattern. The crisis is no longer limited to rare or highly specialized medicine. It is beginning to affect routine treatment as well.

People left searching for treatment

A relative of an elderly diabetic patient in the northern city of Rasht told DW that insulin was being rationed and sold at a sixfold markup from the week before.

Another patient who needs daily medication for a chronic condition told DW he only has enough medicine for 18 days.

"For six weeks, I have been searching for pharmacies, going from one to another, hoping to find it, and every time I hear the same answer: 'We don't have it,'" he said.

"I only need one medicine, and even that has filled my life with stress. I cannot imagine what people go through if they need several drugs, or if they are living with a severe or incurable illness."

Some patients now use social media and private messaging groups to alert one another when a pharmacy still has a particular medicine in stock.

And before the war, some families relied on relatives abroad to send medicine from neighboring countries or Europe through informal networks. Now, with tighter restrictions and weaker communication channels, even those fallback options appear to be closing.

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Edited by: Wesley Rahn