Medicine quality
- Paul Newton, Céline Caillet and their Vientiane based team continue to play a global leadership role in medicine quality research
- We are tabulating the accessible data on the quality of maternal health medicines, antibiotics, antidiabetics, anti-retrovirals, antituberculous drugs, and are mapping these before expanding to other classes of essential medicines
- With funding from the Asian Development Bank, we are completing the first evaluation of multiple innovative medicine quality screening devices that has led to increased global understanding of the pluses and minuses of these devices. The study raised concerns that those using these devices may develop false confidence in the devices and reduce the vital visual inspection of medicines. With the current evidence, it is unlikely that any one device would be able to effectively monitor the quality of all medicines.
- A stratified random survey, using mystery shoppers, of the availability and quality of antibiotics sold to patients in the private sector in five southern Lao provinces found that all contained the stated active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) without evidence for falsification. However, substandard antibiotics were found that will have reduced therapeutic efficacy and are likely to engender AMR.
- We continue to provide evidence to the Member State Mechanism of WHO on medicine quality issues
- We organised the 4th course on Medicine Quality and Public Health and 1st International Conference on Medicine Quality and Public Health in Oxford, in 2018