Tavanir: IV Serum Bag Shortage Not Linked to Power Cuts

The shortage of intravenous serum in drugstores and clinics has nothing to do with power cuts, the spokesman of Iran Power Generation, Distribution and Transmission Company (Tavanir) said.
“As per contracts with industrialists, power supply to cement and steel producers has been limited over the last few weeks. but factories producing medicine, medical supplies and equipment have never and will never face outages,” Mostafa Rajabi Mashhadi was also quoted as saying by IRNA.
Rejecting claims made by Tehran Chamber of Commerce, Industries, Mines and Agriculture’s Health Economy Committee about the link between power cuts and shortage of IV serum bags, he said Tavanir has not curbed power supply to medical equipment manufacturers and they are allowed to consume as much power as they need.
According to Mahmoud Najafi-Arab, the head of TCCIM’s Health Economy Committee, power outages are among the main reasons behind the shortage.
Najafi-Arab noted that the withdrawal of one of the main IV fluid bag companies from the production cycle, increased IV bag consumption in hospitals following the surge in Covid-19 infections and restrictions on the import of a specific petrochemical product have also made a bad situation worse.
“With the rise in the use of remdesivir, which is used in the treatment of Covid-19, demand for IV bags has also increased. Each unit of remdesivir is injected with one unit of IV fluid bags,” he added.