Blood reserves supplying 180 hospitals across Tehran have dropped after two weeks of heavy smog and widespread remote working reduced donor turnout, provincial officials said, warning the shortfall is beginning to affect daily supply plans.
Mohammadreza Mahdizadeh, head of Tehran Province Blood Transfusion, said the capital needs about 1,500 units a day but donations have slipped to roughly 1,100–1,200, creating a daily gap that erodes inventories.
He said mobile teams that previously collected at government offices cannot operate effectively because many staff are working from home, and even where teams can visit, “only one-third of employees are on site,” limiting volunteers.
He added that expected rain later this week typically depresses visits further.
Nationwide stocks stand at about 33,000 units – equal to 4.8 days of supply – but Tehran’s cover has fallen to 3.4 days, according to Babak Yektaperast, acting social affairs deputy at the national blood service.
He said advances in surgery and routine organ transplants have raised structural demand for blood products, widening the impact when donor turnout dips.
Yektaperast said air pollution is not, by itself, a barrier to giving blood, adding that high-risk groups such as children, the elderly, pregnant women and people with underlying diseases are already exempt from donating under blood service protocols.
“Some people may experience throat or eye irritation or chest pain from pollution, and we advise them not to donate,” he said, adding that most healthy adults remain eligible.
He said smog still depresses visits because residents prefer to stay home, while polluted days also bring more hospital admissions for conditions such as cardiac problems, upsetting the balance between donations and demand.
Daily, about 7,500 units are donated nationwide and 7,000 distributed, he said.
Mahdizadeh urged residents – “especially women and young people” – to treat donation as an essential errand during smog alerts and to check the provincial website for collection site hours.
Other provinces report pressure too. In Mazandaran, influenza and seasonal colds have sharply reduced donor turnout across all blood groups, the provincial blood service chief said on Wednesday.
Structural needs also weigh in the southeast. Sistan-Baluchestan has around 3,400 thalassemia patients who together require roughly 8,000 units a month, Yektaperast said, adding that accidents and other emergencies further strain local stocks.
Citing people familiar with the matter, the report said the new allowances follow a fourth-quarter slowdown linked to exhausted permits and sanctions-related frictions that curbed arrivals.
The so-called teapot processors in Shandong province dominate China’s intake of discounted Iranian barrels, but overall demand may stay subdued through year-end as weak margins persist, according to analytics firm Vortexa cited by Bloomberg.
Two supertankers that had been waiting off China discharged this week, including the Panama-flagged Ill Gap with about 2 million barrels at Rizhao, the report added.
Iranian crude held in floating storage has climbed to the highest in roughly two and a half years as exports outpaced Chinese buying, shipping tracker Kpler estimates.
Discounts have widened as cargoes accumulate.
Offers for Iran Light this week were around $8–$9 a barrel below ICE Brent, compared with roughly $4 in August, traders told Bloomberg.
The pressure reflects a well-supplied global market and intermittent bottlenecks on Chinese intake tied to quota availability and compliance risks.
In late October, Reuters reported Iranian barrels to China changing hands at the steepest discounts in over a year amid tighter Western sanctions on Iran and Russia and a shortage of teapot import quotas.
China allocates crude import volumes to non-state refiners in tranches. Analysts said the latest allotment gave about 20 teapots some 7–8 million tons combined, enabling refiners to clear on-water inventories and draw from bonded tanks.
But with refinery margins thin and some buyers wary after recent sanctions on firms and facilities accused of handling Iranian oil, industry watchers expect sanctioned crude to continue accumulating on the water into December.
AFP reported that at least 34 ships linked to suspected sanctions evasion were Cook Islands–flagged over the period, including 20 cited on US sanctions lists and a further 14 on a British blacklist.
The flag is administered by Maritime Cook Islands, a private operator that runs the registry for the self-governing Pacific territory.
The analysis said shipowners could obtain Cook Islands papers without visiting the country, using a small beachside office – located next to a pizza shop – as their point of contact. The office serves as the headquarters for what AFP described as one of the world’s fastest-growing shipping registries.
New Zealand, which has a free-association relationship with the Cook Islands and retains responsibilities that include foreign affairs, said the findings show a policy divergence with the microstate and that Wellington has repeatedly raised concerns with its government.
“New Zealand continues to hold serious concerns about how the Cook Islands has been managing its shipping registry, which it has repeatedly expressed to the Cook Islands government over many years... This is a completely unacceptable and untenable foreign policy divergence,” said a spokesman for Foreign Minister Winston Peters.
Maritime Cook Islands said it does not harbor sanctioned vessels and that any ships accused of sanctions-busting are promptly deleted from the registry, adding that it conducts due diligence checks before registration.
Western sanctions aim to limit oil revenue for Tehran and Moscow.
Analysts say a “shadow fleet” uses reflagging, opaque ownership and ship-to-ship transfers to move cargoes outside mainstream maritime services – a practice that places added scrutiny on flag registries as enforcement widens to entities connected to suspect voyages.
