WHO calls for safety and quality to be prioritised in developing world
Developing countries must be given better access to information that
can improve the safety and quality of medicines, according to the World
Health Organization.
“We must strengthen safety monitoring activities of medicines at
a global level,” said Anarfi Asamoa-Baah, the WHO’s executive
director for health technology and pharmaceuticals. “Lower-income
countries must be allowed to benefit from the sophisticated monitoring
systems that already exist in industrialised nations.”
The WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring has a medicines database
at the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, Sweden (www.who-umc.org), which contains
almost three million recorded cases of adverse drug reactions.
When a significant number of similar reports are detected all national
drug regulatory authorities are alerted.
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