Monitor safety, effectiveness of drugs

 By: Rebecca Kwei ( Philadelphia Pennsylvania, USA Courtesy: UNICEF-Ghana)

A PROFESSOR at the School of Public Health of the University of Ghana, Legon, Prof Fred Binka, has called for the strengthening of institutions that monitor the safety and effectiveness of drugs in developing countries.

He said this would ensure that policy recommendations made by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on tropical diseases were informed by data obtained in real life settings in Africa.

Prof Binka made the call in an interview after he had delivered a paper on “Prospective for Monitoring New ACTs in Rural settings – Optimizing the use of demographic surveys” at the 56 th annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

More than 3000 scientists, researchers, doctors, policy makers, pharmaceutical companies and the private sector from across the globe are attending the meeting to discuss issues relating to tropical diseases.

For instance, Prof Binka said many drugs will soon be introduced for the treatment of malaria and it was important that measures were put in place to test the effectiveness of these drugs after they had been introduced to the populace.

He said every new artemisinin-combination therapy (ACT) introduced needs to be monitored so that any development of resistance by parasites to the drug will be quickly identified.

This he said would allow for corrective measures to be put in place.

He said it was also important for the public to be in the know when a new drug was being monitored so that the public could gain confidence in the use of that drug and also cooperate with researchers by providing information on safety and quality of these drugs during usage.

Prof. Binka mentioned the demography surveillance sites he set up in Navrongo and other places as a good model for collecting information on local population over long periods of time.

There are 37 sentinel sites in 17 countries including Ghana coordinated by the INDEPTH network set up by Prof Binka and these hold the key to obtaining useful health related information in rural areas across Africa.

In another presentation on ACTs in Endemic countries, Dr Alex Dodoo of the University of Ghana Medical School and President-elect of the Pharmaceutical Society of Ghana called for active safety monitoring of all new drugs in malaria endemic countries.

Referring to work carried out by University of Ghana Medical School (UGMS) on pharmacovigilance, Dr Dodoo showed the importance of following patients up actively in order to identify any safety problems and treat them.

In doing so, he said useful information on the safety or otherwise of new antimalarials would be obtained quickly.

The UGMS plays a leading role in pharmacovigilance systems globally and Dr Dodoo called for the unique experience gained in the school to be shared across Africa.

Dr. Feiko ter Kuille of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine who spoke on malaria in pregnancy called for the establishment of registers to keep details of women who take artemisinins like artesunate so that information on the safety of these drugs in pregnancy will be known.

Dr. ter Kuille is heading the Malaria in Pregnancy (MiP) Consortium funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with the main aim of obtaining information on the types of malaria medicines which can be used safely during pregnancy.

Source/Credit: The Mirror ( Ghana)