Trump’s sanctions on Iran: Four children died due to shortages of medicines



Jeremy Salt



Access to essential medicines as part of the right to health is clearly mentioned in World Health Organization Org Chart and Universal Declaration of Human Rights .

Medical sanctions is also considered as as human rights violations.

While Humanitarian supplies are officially exempted from sanctions,harsh banking restrictions and the threat of secondary sanctions for companies doing business with Iran have made it nearly impossible to import life saving medicines to Iran.

The outcome is that sanctions are targeting civilians instead of Iranian government.

shortages of life-saving medicines influenced directly cancer and MS patients.Also,patients with hemophilia’s access has been significantly reduced and the lives of thousands of patients is at risk.





The sanction of medications has divided patients in two groups: Some patients who have relatives in foreign countries try to provide their own medicines through a passenger. It’s a dangerous way to take outdated medications.

The majority of patients have been forced not to use their necessary medicines.

Recently, nearly 200 mental health professionals wrote an open letter to the authorities about the declining availability of medicines. One of the signatories, Dr. Amir Hossein Jalali, a psychiatrist in Tehran, said in an interview over Telegram that “even some domestically produced medicines that need raw materials from outside of the country have also faced a lot of shortages.”

Four children have died at a hospital in Iran’s southern city of Ahvaz this week due to shortage of cancer medications following Trump administration’s use of sanctions against Iran.

Experience in Iraq, Cuba, Libya and the former Yugoslavia indicates that sanctions seldom meet their political objectives. But they have caused large-scale humanitarian disasters in those countries (see, for example, M. M. Ali and I. H. Shah Lancet 355, 1851–1857; 2000).







