Tunisia’s financial crisis leaves the sick struggling to find medicine

Sick Tunisians face a frantic struggle to find some medicines because the state has reduced imports, leaving doctors unable to control debilitating health problems and patients turning to informal markets for their medication.

Hundreds of medicines have been missing for months, pharmacies say, including important treatments for heart disease, cancer and diabetes as well as more basic products such as medicated eye drops whose absence worsens chronic conditions.

“The issue of missing medicine has become very hard for patients. We have a real problem with some medicines for which there are no generics available,” said Douha Maaoui Faourati, a Tunis doctor specializing in kidney and blood pressure disease.

Faourati has had to ask patients to try to get drugs from Europe, including ones used to control dangerously irregular heartbeat, swelling and clotting, and for which she says no good alternative is available in Tunisia.

Her difficulties show how Tunisia’s worsening fiscal problems are hitting ordinary people and adding to public anger at a state barely able to maintain even basic services.

Since last year Tunisia has struggled to pay for other goods that are sold at subsidised rates, causing periodic shortages of bread, dairy products and cooking oil as foreign currency reserves dropped from 130 days of imports to 93 days.

Tunisia wants a $1.9 billion International Monetary Fund bailout, without which ratings agencies have

The issue of missing medicine has become very hard for patients. We have a real problem with some medicines for which there are no generics available.

Douha Maaoui Faourati

Tunis doctor

warned it may default on sovereign debt, but President Kais Saied has rejected key terms of the deal and donors say talks have stalled.

Tunisia imports all medicine through the state-owned Central Pharmacy, which provides drugs to hospitals and pharmacies around the country which offer them to patients at a subsidised rate.