Pharmacovigilance in developing countries

doi:10.1136/bmj.39323.586123.BE

BMJ 2007;335:462 (8 September), doi:10.1136/bmj.39323.586123.BE

Editorials

Pharmacovigilance in developing countries

Requires collaboration between stakeholders to develop novelmodels of funding

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Efforts are increasing to ensure that resource poor countries,which bear almost 90% of the global disease burden, have accessto effective medicines.¹ As a result, drug companies are facingincreased pressure from governments, the World Health Organization,and patient lobby groups to remove legal and financial barriersto access.² However, although these campaigns are necessaryand clearly laudable, they are not accompanied by the developmentor upscaling of processes for monitoring drug safety. Althoughmany drugs have been extensively used and studied in developedcountries (thus informing global practice), their safety profilecannot necessarily be generalised to developing countries, wherethe incidence, pattern, and severity of adverse reactions maydiffer markedly because of local environmental and genetic influences.³

After the thalidomide disaster in the 1960s, most Western countriesdeveloped national pharmacovigilance systems.⁴ These systemsuse spontaneous reporting or other pharmacoepidemiological methodsto systematically collect and analyse adverse events associated. . . [Full text of this article]

Munir Pirmohamed, professor of clinical pharmacology¹, Kwame N Atuah, postdoctoral research fellow¹, Alex N O Dodoo, senior pharmacovigilance scientist², Peter Winstanley, professor of clinical pharmacology³

¹ Department of Pharmacology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3GE, ² Centre for Tropical Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, University of Ghana Medical School, Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, Accra, Ghana, ³ Department of Pharmacology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3GE

munirp@liv.ac.uk

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