African Heat
- PDF / 92,044 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 496.063 x 711.496 pts Page_size
- 47 Downloads / 183 Views
Drug Saf 2010; 33 (12): 1059-1063 0114-5916/10/0012-1059/$49.95/0
ª 2010 Adis Data Information BV. All rights reserved.
African Heat I. Ralph Edwards Uppsala Monitoring Centre, Uppsala, Sweden
It is common for Northern Europeans and North Americans to seek warmer climates in the autumn, but for anyone interested in pharmacovigilance the ‘hottest’ location was certainly Accra, Ghana. Within the University of Ghana Medical School, the Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC)-Africa and the WHO Collaborating Centre for Advocacy and Training in Pharmacovigilance have not only been in operation for about 1 year but Accra was also the location for the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring Annual Centres Meeting (31 October–3 November), as well as the 10th International Society of Pharmacovigilance (IsoP) Annual Meeting (3–6 November). The two meetings were therefore back-to-back with a joint meeting day. The agendas of the meetings give some insight into their current relevance and to the current state of pharmacovigilance in sub-Saharan Africa and resource-poor settings in general. 1. Forging Ahead in Africa One of the most exciting general pharmacovigilance happenings to report from Accra is the rapid progress of UMC-Africa. For the last 4 years a WHO project to trainthe-trainers has brought together senior health professionals with a keen interest in pharmacovigilance from about 20 African countries. At the most recent workshop for this group in Togo, in September 2010, the group affirmed their support for the WHO-UMC Centre in Accra, and also proposed that a future structure should be an African free-standing, self-sustaining network coordinated from Accra. Such a proposal from a group of senior African pharmaco-
vigilance experts should go a long way to provide assurance to donor organizations that pharmacovigilance in Africa is a serious public health consideration, which has serious support from high-level professionals and policy makers. A consequence of this is that those involved in drug donations to Africa should include public health outcome measures for both effectiveness and safety, which must be considered by, and made relevant to, the work in each of the existing national pharmacovigilance programmes. The new African network has already contributed new ideas and approaches to global pharmacovigilance, being at the fore of patient safety development, widening the scope of pharmacovigilance in general and in taking active communication to the public seriously. I expect that the network will continue to thrive and develop as an independent group. It will certainly be supported in doing so by the UMC and WHO, and I hope others will also help UMC- and WHO-Africa to do their job, whilst respecting their national and regional autonomy. Africa cannot afford to add a load of iatrogenic harm to its other disease burdens. 1.1 Pharmacovigilance Toolkit
This is an early success of UMC-Africa and is a compilation of information, tools and resources for those working in pharmacovigilance that is planned to be avai
Data Loading...
