Lebanese doctors say patients will die if drug shortage continues

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Dr. Hadi Mourad says his patients are suffering and dying, and there's nothing he can do about it. 

The physician is one of many Lebanese health-care professionals speaking out about a shortage of pharmaceutical drugs in the country. 

One of his patients needed emergency gallbladder surgery last week, he said, but the surgeons couldn't help her because they had no anesthetic drugs. Another had his hemodialysis treatment postponed twice due to lack of supplies. If that patient doesn't get the treatment regularly, he could die. 

"He is, like, 70 years old, and he is begging me to do for him a favour, and I can do nothing," Mourad told As It Happens host Carol Off.

"This is one of the worst events I have ever heard of in Lebanon since the Civil War."

'A crime against humanity'

Lebanon is grappling with an unprecedented economic and financial crisis that has seen the local currency collapse. 

The country's once-thriving health-care system has been among the hardest hit, with some hospitals halting elective surgeries, laboratories running out of test kits and pharmacies running out of drugs.

"Right now, doctors are emigrating. Now the pharmacists have no medications in the pharmacies. Nurses cannot inject medications for people in the hospitals because of the lack of the medications. Now the lab technicians cannot even do labs for the patients because lab kits are not available," Mourad said. 

On Thursday, doctors said they may be forced to suspend kidney dialysis next.

Hala Kilani, the doctor in charge of the dialysis department at the Lebanese American University Medical Center - Rizk Hospital, said medical teams were fighting each day to secure the necessary amounts of filters needed to continue with dialysis and blood tests for patients. 

George Ghanem, chief medical officer at the hospital, called it "a crime against humanity."

On Friday, pharmacists across Lebanon shut their doors for a two-day strike to protest the shortages. 

Doctors, dentists, nurses and lab scientists all joined the pharmacists in the streets outside the Health Ministry's interior courtyard to demand change. Dr. Mourad was among them.

"Right now, the Ministry of Public Health has done nothing, has done literally nothing," Mourad said. "They are putting the blame on everybody, but not holding responsibility for the major catastrophic event that's happening right now."

If his patients die, Mourad says the blood will be on the government's hands. 

As It Happens has reached out to the ministry for comment.

How did this happen?

The crisis in Lebanon is rooted in decades of corruption and mismanagement by an entrenched political class. 

The situation was exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and a massive August 2020 explosion at Beirut's port that wrecked the facility and large swaths of the city. Lebanon imports nearly everything, including 85 per cent of its pharmaceuticals.

The cabinet of outgoing prime minister Hassan Diab resigned days after the Beirut explosion, and the country has been without a fully functioning government since.  

The crisis has driven more than half of the population into poverty and caused the local currency to lose more than 85 percent of its value. 

With its foreign reserves drying up, the Central Bank said in May it can no longer afford to subsidize medicines in the country, which has led to hoarding and panic buying. 

Meanwhile, the difference between the official and black market dollar rate energized smuggling, and subsidized Lebanese drugs were being whisked to neighbouring countries.

Mourad is part of a local coalition of independent physicians called The White Coat Organization. They are calling on the World Health Organization and the United Nations to stop sending aid to the Lebanese government and the Central Bank, which they don't trust.

Instead, they are asking aid groups and NGOs to bypass official channels and deal exclusively with the Lebanese army, the Red Cross and local universities and hospitals. 

"Those three pillars are the only entities that we trust," Mourad said. 

Doctors say 350 brands of basic medications are currently in short supply. Mourad says people are unable to access medicine for diabetes, heart disease, neurological conditions, psychological conditions and even cancer. 

"We are now back to the old school of medicine. We are now back to, you know, the alternative medicine and the herbal medicine, because we have no resources," he said. "They left us without any single resource in order to help the patients and the needy people."

Written by Sheena Goodyear with files from The Associated Press. Interview with Dr. Hadi Mourad produced by Niza Lyapa Nondo.