How has the war in Iran affected global medical supplies?

Several thousand people have been killed in Iran since the U.S.-Israeli war broke out, but the unsteady conflict is creating an additional humanitarian crisis: delays and shortages of medical supplies. Hospitals and health care clinics throughout the Middle East are reporting critical lapses in supplies, which experts fear could lead to a surge in deaths even as the United States agreed to a temporary ceasefire.

What did the commentators say?

With the war in a state of flux, humanitarian centers “across the Middle East, Asia and Africa are facing the risk of running out of basic medication and food” due to the “restriction of shipments in the Strait of Hormuz,” said NPR. Some of this food, especially dry and canned goods, can “be stored for a long time,” Bob Kitchen, the vice president of emergencies and humanitarian action with the International Rescue Committee, said to NPR. But health care supplies are a different story, as most of the “medicines or treatments for malnutrition will expire.”

Many of these countries rely almost entirely on foreign aid for medical supplies. Sudan, for example, has “no manufacturing capacity and is entirely dependent on imported medication,” Omer Sharfy of Save the Children in Sudan said to NPR. This means health care workers “won’t be able to find alternatives in the local market.” The war has also “disrupted the movement of medical supplies from WHO’s global logistics hub in Dubai,” said the World Health Organization. By March 11, just 12 days into the war, over “50 emergency supply requests, intended to benefit over 1.5 million people across 25 countries,” were “affected, resulting in significant backlogs.”

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Even countries far away from the conflict are bearing the brunt of these scarcities. Fears of syringe and IV shortages in South Korea are “spreading through Korea’s health care sector, prompting authorities to urge medical providers to refrain from stockpiling,” said The Korea Times. The problem is not that the Persian Gulf countries are “major drug producers. They’re not,” said health care news nonprofit Healthbeat. But these nations do “form ‘a critical pharmaceutical transit hub,’ where drugs and their basic ingredients from India, Europe and China routinely pass before heading to Africa, Asia and the United States.”

What next?

Some are hopeful that the two-week ceasefire, announced by President Donald Trump and initially agreed to by Iran, will allow the flow of medicine to restart. But while the U.S. has backed a ceasefire, Israel has continued its assault on the region, carrying out a series of strikes in Lebanon. Iran reclosed the strait in “response to Israeli attacks against the Hezbollah militant group,” said The Associated Press. Iran later accused the U.S. of also violating the deal, and claimed that a long-term ceasefire was “unreasonable.”

Even before the strait was closed again, experts say it is unlikely its opening would have made a huge difference in moving global medical supplies. The ceasefire deal would not lead to a “‘mass exodus’ of ships through the Strait of Hormuz,” said The Guardian. The deal also allows Iran and Oman to “charge a fee of up to $2 million a ship on vessels transiting through the strait,” which could further limit the amount of supplies that are able to pass.

With no end to the larger skirmish in sight, fears persist that the shipment of medical supplies could remain at risk. All of these events are happening in an industry that was “decimated by funding cuts from the United States and Europe last year,” said The Washington Post, and is “now straining to meet demand that grows with each additional day of war.”