Track regulatory and WHO alerts on our substandard and falsified medical products tool
23 Jul 2021
Substandard and falsified (SF*) medical products, including medicines, vaccines, diagnostic tests and medical devices are critical global public health issues and current SF surveillance in most of the world is extremely limited. Information sharing on SF incidents is very poor. Our Medicine Quality Research Group’s Medicine Quality Monitoring Globe (MQM Globe) has been developed to improve this and it now also includes regulatory & alert web pages.
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Incidents relating to SF medicines are often not published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. In response the Medicine Quality Research Group (MQRG) launched the MQM Globe in 2020 with the aim to facilitate easier access to evidence by bringing together publicly available information to help fill evidence gaps. In the section on ‘lay press articles’, the MQM Globe collates SF reports from articles of national and international newspaper retrieved from Google News which are curated and mapped on the globe with reports available in English, French, Chinese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
In this latest update, the MQM Globe has been expanded to include a section on ‘Regulatory & alert web pages’ so users can readily access the web pages of regulatory authorities across 74 countries and other institutions, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), that contain specific information on SF medical products.
The non-exhaustive list of Ministries of Health and Medicines Regulatory Authorities, links to dedicated web pages on medical product quality issues, hosting information on recalls, safety alerts on SF medical products, illegal products, product quality problems in general, warning letters to manufacturers and more.
This section was developed because, as far as we know, there is no existing platform that groups all the available information and alerts from regulatory authorities and other institutions in one place. Relatively few regulatory authorities publicly release these data and there is no uniformity as to how and which information is shared. Currently only ‘SF dedicated web pages’ are accessible through the MQM Globe.
The MQRG also publishes regular reports about SF-related COVID-19 medical products and COVID-19 vaccines.
Find out more about the MQM Globe.
* About SF medical products
Substandard medical products result from errors and negligence during manufacture, procurement, transportation, or storage. In contrast, falsified products result from criminal fraud. Although they have been traded for many centuries, in the last few decades the problem seems to have grown, partly because of the increased complexity of the global pharmaceutical economy and internet sales.