Published 2 October 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b3830
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;339:b3830

Feature

International Aid

The cost of donated drugs

¹ Scrip World Pharmaceutical News, London EC2A 4LQ

With new WHO guidelines due out next year, Elizabeth Sukkar examines the problem of inappropriate drug donations

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

More than 4000 tonnes of medicines were donated to people in the Aceh region of Indonesia after the December 2004 tsunami. Of these, 600 tonnes were out of date or about to expire and cost an estimated 2.4m (£1.5m; 1.6m) to destroy.¹

This is just one example of inappropriate drug donations that the World Health Organization has collated. Although WHO has had guidelines on drug donation for over a decade, with the last revision in 1999, adherence is often poor.² It is currently revising the guidelines to try to improve the situation.²

"Unfortunately, countries in crises are still suffering from bad donations. Roughly half of donations in emergencies that are evaluated are still reported as inappropriate. Although we have seen much improvement over the years, we still observe problems. Not all donations and relief efforts are evaluated or documented systematically," says Helene Moller, technical officer in WHO’s department for essential . . . [Full text of this article]

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    StumbleUpon    Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Article

Guidelines for drug donations

H V Hogerzeil, M R Couper, and R Gray
BMJ 1997 314: 737. [Abstract] [Full Text]

Rapid Responses:

Read all Rapid Responses

It isn’t written anywhere that the poor should be without choice

Jerry Norris
bmj.com, 12 Oct 2009 [Full text]

Online poll

Find out more on doc2doc >>