Azerbaijan, Baku, Nov.5/ Trend F.Milad/
The Central Bank of Iran has allocated 500 million euros to medicine imports, head of the Iranian Parliament's Health Committee, Hossein Ali Shahriari, said on Monday.
"But the process of receiving the money and buying the medicines will take a lot of time and this makes a lot of difficulties for the patients," he added, the IRNA News Agency reported.
"In order to meet the Iranian patients' demands for medicine, some 2.5billion dollars should be allocated by the end of the current Iranian calendar year (March 20, 2013)," Shahriari said.
Iranian doctors, patients and officials say that due to a ban on financial transactions, even medicines and other critical supplies that are exempted from the sanctions for humanitarian reasons are no longer exported to the country, New York Times reported on November 2.
Officials here estimate that potentially about six million patients, many of them with cancer, are affected by the shortages.
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