Lebanon crisis needs international assistance urgently: WHO chief 

Speaking from the capital, Beirut, astatine the extremity of a two-day visit to the beleaguered Mediterranean country, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described finding shortages of “basic and essential medicines”. 

Although the WHO has done what it can to capable gaps successful healthcare there for the past 15 years, the WHO Director-General said that the concern had go “very dire” and that planetary enactment was needed immediately.  

“It’s not conscionable COVID, astir each services are being affected,” helium said. “We visited 2 hospitals today… they told america that you know, they had, patients, crab patients oregon different patients, but a shortage of medicines and those who cannot spend not having entree to, they can’t person medicine, truthful meaning different services are being disrupted, and this is life, life, beingness and death.” 

Lebanon’s unprecedented political and economic crisis has been made worse by the COVID pandemic and past August’s larboard explosion. 

Fuel and powerfulness shortages

Tedros said that when he went to meet top Government officials, a power cut interrupted their encounter. 

Similar fuel shortages person near hospitals functioning astatine 50 per cent capacity, the WHO Director-General said, adding that he had agreed to send a team of wellness experts to Lebanon to connection method support as soon arsenic possible. 

The UN health agency has also provided “Band-Aid” assistance to the country’s aesculapian sector, Tedros added. 

This includes the purchase of essential medicines for 450,000 patients with acute and chronic conditions last twelvemonth and this year. 

But Dr Iman Shankiti, WHO Representative successful Lebanon, told journalists that the caseload is now increasing and that demand is increasing for medications to treat cancer, dialysis and emergency patients. 

“At 1 constituent successful clip we were capable to support 2,000 crab paediatric cases and we were capable to enactment 17,000 persons with catastrophic medications, but this is not enough,” she said. “I cannot accidental that we person filled the gap, we person closed the shortage. The needs are huge….It needs a whole-of-Government approach (to solving the shortages)”. 

Regional insecurity risk 

While in Beirut, Tedros visited several wellness facilities, including the recently renovated Central Drug Warehouse that had been destroyed by the Beirut port blast.

Accompanying him, Dr Ahmed Al Mandhari, Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean, highlighted the threat to determination instability if Lebanon’s health sector was not propped up.

The country was rapidly losing its longstanding presumption arsenic a key provider of medical professionals, he warned, arsenic its youngsters near the country to question enactment elsewhere.

Lebanon’s strong vaccination and immunisation system was besides nether threat, said Dr Al Mandhari, noting that it had “protected the children of Lebanon and each those surviving successful Lebanon, which helped america successful the region and beyond to power communicable diseases like for example polio, measles and other communicable diseases that impact adults and children. So, if determination is simply a interruption oregon a weakness successful this expanded programme of immunisation successful the state it will definitely deed different countries successful the region.”