Technoglitch
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Within days of being given a diphtheria jab during a school vaccination drive, 5-year-old Meraj Shabbir Khan’s leg became so swollen that he was hospitalised.
In a cramped Mumbai paediatric ward, third-year pharmacology student Nitin Shinde opens the boy’s file and notes the vaccine, his age and the doctor’s diagnosis of a skin infection. That information is later logged into a computer programme linked to a national database, part of India’s fledgling efforts to track, analyse and ultimately warn patients about unknown side effects of drugs on the market.
India’s six-year-old pharmacovigilance programme, which collects and submits suspected adverse drug reactions to a World Health Organisation (WHO) database, is key to improving drug safety in a country where medicine consumption is high, experts say.
But insufficient staff and equipment, and a lack of awareness among medical professionals mean many potentially dangerous drug reactions go unrecorded, hospital personnel across India told Reuters.
Gaps in the system mean the government has less data to determine whether drugs might have harmful side effects. Also, relatively little information flows from one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical markets to the WHO database of over 12 million suspected adverse drug reactions.
“In a country of 1 billion people consuming so much medicine, obviously safety is a concern,” said G. Parthasarathi, dean of the pharmacy school at JSS University in Mysore, adding the pharmacovigilance programme is still gaining traction. “We’ve made a good start,” he said.
| india | Hindustan Times
In a cramped Mumbai paediatric ward, third-year pharmacology student Nitin Shinde opens the boy’s file and notes the vaccine, his age and the doctor’s diagnosis of a skin infection. That information is later logged into a computer programme linked to a national database, part of India’s fledgling efforts to track, analyse and ultimately warn patients about unknown side effects of drugs on the market.
India’s six-year-old pharmacovigilance programme, which collects and submits suspected adverse drug reactions to a World Health Organisation (WHO) database, is key to improving drug safety in a country where medicine consumption is high, experts say.
But insufficient staff and equipment, and a lack of awareness among medical professionals mean many potentially dangerous drug reactions go unrecorded, hospital personnel across India told Reuters.
Gaps in the system mean the government has less data to determine whether drugs might have harmful side effects. Also, relatively little information flows from one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical markets to the WHO database of over 12 million suspected adverse drug reactions.
“In a country of 1 billion people consuming so much medicine, obviously safety is a concern,” said G. Parthasarathi, dean of the pharmacy school at JSS University in Mysore, adding the pharmacovigilance programme is still gaining traction. “We’ve made a good start,” he said.
| india | Hindustan Times