Pharmacies and patients in Turkey are sounding the alarm: The country is lamenting dramatic shortages of medicines. Erdogan’s “economic war of independence” is to blame.
Emin Durmus is looking for cough syrup. “You don’t have the remedy. So I’ll go get a new prescription. Then I come to this pharmacy and the drug isn’t available either,” says the 62-year-old, who needs something against his five-year-old grandson’s cough. He is just one of the thousands of Turks who are currently running from one pharmacy to the next looking for imported medicines.
Medicines are currently sold out in Turkey as quickly as the Turkish lira is depreciating. The currency’s decline accelerated last month when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called an “economic war of independence”.
Erdogan wants to fight rapid inflation in his country with low interest rates – the exact opposite of what countries normally do in similar situations. As a result, the Turkish currency has lost 40 percent of its value since the beginning of November. In January, a lira was worth 13 US cents. This month it was just over half.
Pharmacies: delivery difficulties with 645 products, difficult to find thousands of products
One consequence is the scarcity of medicines. Imported drugs against diseases such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease or the flu are almost impossible to find in the approximately 27,000 pharmacies in Turkey. Doctors are also reporting difficulties with drugs for fever, nausea and stomach pain, and pharmacists are warning of a shortage of drugs to treat diabetes, high blood pressure and asthma.
Fatih Yüksel, 35, has a rare autoimmune disease known as Behcet’s syndrome. “Sometimes there are phases when I don’t get the medication I need and my illness gets worse,” says the seller from Ankara. Then he suffers from pain. “It’s hard sometimes, but I have to work.”
The Turkish health minister Fahrettin Koca recently put the blame on the drug manufacturers who tried to “sell Turkey expensive drugs”. News of drug shortages in Turkey is untrue, said Koca.
But pharmacists report heartbreaking news from patients pleadingly asking where to get their medication. The Turkish Pharmacists Association said in November that 645 medicines were affected by delivery problems. Pharmacist Berna Yücel Mintas told the AFP news agency that it has been difficult to find around a thousand funds since the situation worsened.
Falling prices and rising prices
Part of the problem is how Turkey sources medicines. The Ministry of Health sets standard drug prices every February, based on an exchange rate set by the government. For this year the exchange rate was set at 4.57 lira for one euro.
On the foreign exchange market, however, one euro has now cost 20 Turkish lira. Taner Ercanli from the Chamber of Pharmacists in Ankara explains that manufacturers would not sell drugs to Turkey because they could get more money for them elsewhere. The pharmacists are asking the government to adjust prices at least three times a year.
But there are even more problems: The corona pandemic has increased the prices of most raw materials, which means that the drugs produced in Turkey have also become more expensive. The affected pharmaceutical companies are also annoyed by late government payments, which are doubly painful given the currency depreciation. Employers’ associations are already warning of corporate bankruptcies.
The pharmacies are threatened with a general drug shortage – a frightening development not only for chronically ill people like Fatih Yüksel.
Source From: Stern
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