BEIRUT, Jan. 21 (Xinhua) -- About 3,400 pharmacies in Lebanon are suffering from the drop in prices of pharmaceutical drugs, facing the risk of shutting down in the years to come if they can't secure enough revenues.

"Prices of some of the medicine have dropped in an unreasonable manner by the end of last year which impacted our profits to a great extent," Mohamed Jaber, owner of a pharmacy in Dahieh, a suburb in the south of the capital Beirut, told Xinhua.

Some of the selling prices have dropped below the purchase ones as importers did not adopt any measures to compensate for the losses, he lamented.

Worse still, the Lebanese health ministry adopted a mechanism where the profit of the pharmacist's is fixed at 86 U.S. dollars for chronic disease medications and other expensive medicines even if they are priced at 5,000 dollars or higher.

"What the health ministry did not pay attention to is that the pharmacist's will avoid selling these kinds of medications because their profit is so low that even the taxes imposed by the finance ministry are not covered," Jaber noted.

The Lebanese pharmacist said he understands the need to reduce prices to allow affordable medications since the government does not provide full health coverage for the citizens.

However, he added, importers who make huge profits must at least share some of their revenues with the pharmacist's.

But Joe Salloum, also a pharmacist, said even some of the importers are shutting down because they are not making the profit as they used to.

Salloum believes that the government must adopt a fair mechanism to benefit both pharmacists and citizens.

"Such a mechanism is necessary because around 1,500 pharmacists risk losing their jobs because of the drop in the profits of pharmacies while a big number of pharmacists are now employed on a part-time basis with half salaries," he told Xinhua.

Karim Jbara, head of Pharmaceuticals Importers Association, told Xinhua that importers' profit margin is half that of pharmacists, saying it is the manufacturer who should share profits with both pharmacists and importers.

For his part, Riad Fadlallah, advisor to the health minister, explained to Xinhua that the ministry reduces the prices of the medicine as they are higher in Lebanon than nearby countries.

"We take the lowest price and we price our medicine accordingly," he said. Enditem

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