Azerbaijan, Baku, Feb.24/ Trend F.Milad
Rare Diseases Foundation of Iran has reached agreement with some European countries to import needed medicines, Ali Davoudian, the managing director of the foundation, said on Sunday.
Davoudian urged the health ministry to provide the foundation with necessary licenses for medicine imports as soon as possible.
Iran imported 1.6 billion dollars worth of medicines and medical equipments in first 9 months of the current Iranian Calendar year, which started March 20, 2012.
The amount showed 4 per cent increase in terms of volume, while facing 7 per cent decrease in term of value.
Iran's medicine imports accounted for one million dollars in the mentioned period.
The Central Bank of Iran reported last month that the Iranian banks have allocated 2.8 billion dollars to medicine purchase in the first ten months of current Iranian calendar year.
The amount of 400 million dollars is more than in the same period previous year, Mehr News Agency reported.
In order to meet the Iranian patients' demands, some 2.5 billion dollars should be allocated to medicine purchase by the end of the current Iranian calendar year (March 20, 2013), said the Head of the Iranian Parliament's Health Committee, Hossein Ali Shahriari on November 5, 2012.
Iranian doctors, patients and officials say that due to a ban on financial transactions, even medicines and other critical supplies exempted from the sanctions for humanitarian reasons are no longer exported to the country, New York Times reported on November 2.
An estimated number of six million patients, many of them with cancer, are affected by the shortages.
