Maduro asks UN to solve medicine woe

CaraCas: President Nicolas Maduro said he had asked the United Nations to help address severe shortages of medicine in Venezuela, a rare acknowledgement of the crisis-hit country’s desperate situation.

“I have asked the United Nations to regularise the whole medicine issue. The United Nations has the most advanced plans to recover the pharmaceutical industry’s productive capacity,” the leftist leader said in a speech broadcast on national television.

With Venezuela stuck in the fourth year of a deep recession, shortages of food and many essential goods, including medicine, have become rampant.

Venezuelans tell of desperately hunting for their medication at depleted pharmacies, or paying small fortunes to buy it on the black market or abroad.

Horror stories have emerged from hospitals of patients losing limbs for lack of antibiotics or dying for lack of cancer drugs.