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Key medication brands not available in Damascus

(Eqtsad)- Medication crisis and shortage of most kind of drugs in Damascus is highly mentioned at social media websites, as people talk about lack of medicine and the difficulty of getting it in the capital, besides expressing anger on the regime and officials of the pharmaceutical sector accusing them of lying to people, besides accusing them of corruption and collaboration with medications' smugglers to monopolize certain kind of drugs in order to create a crisis, thus take advantage of them to earn more financially.

As an attempt to deceive Syrian people and to calm their anger, the regime-supporting al-Baath newspaper had published on January 17, 2017 an interview with the Deputy Minister of Heath for medication affairs, Dr. Huda Al-Sayed, who spoke about the Ministry of Health's policy in regard to drug distribution saying: "the strategy adopted by the Ministry of Health to control drug production, starting from controlling laboratories and medication factories then follow-up distributed amount to warehouses in different provinces to ensure fair geographical distribution”.

The official’s statement is not considered more than a verbal confirmation and does not reflect on people’s health equally, as the Ministry of Health distributes medications according to areas’ loyalty to regime, as loyal areas get the majority of the medication, while the opposition areas only receiving a small amount. That can be seen in the countryside of Damascus controlled by the opposition, even those have been recaptured by the regime in Western countryside, still have small amount of medication.

Local and international reports indicated that almost five thousand type of medications are missed in Syria since 2011, which has been denied by the regime and its Ministry of health.

In reality the most important medications for chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart diseases, high blood pressure, cancer, chronic inflammatory diseases, liver disease, and drugs for kidney transplant, the only available alternatives are the Iranian drugs smuggled from Iraq or from those brought from Kurdistan of Iraq, which are not effective and sometimes expired.

According to al-Baath newspaper, the Scientific Council for pharmaceutical industry denied the rumours of missing some kinds of medications, confirming that to secure the availability of drugs and prevent monopolising drugs, 7 factories were licensed to produce the kinds of specialised medications, and 10 factories for general medications.

People started losing their trust in the Syrian drugs, and they tend to buy the exported or manufactured in western countrie, relying on pharmacists advice, as long as they can afford the cost.

Fatima, a woman from Damascus explained that she no longer trust doctors and drugs, she goes straight away to pharmacy and look for western medications.
an old man with hypertension and diabetes suffered of ineffective drugs, he explained that he was forced to change his medications many times due to their ineffectiveness.

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