Medicine Quality monitoring
IDDO’s Medicine Quality Research Group has developed a system for collating and curating global data on the quality of essential medical products and occurrence of substandard and falsified (SF) medical products in the lay press – the Medicine Quality Monitoring Globe (MQM Globe).
It is clear that the COVID-19 pandemic poses enormous risks to the global medical product supply. The main current risk is of shortages of diverse essential medicines due to stalling of pharmaceutical production and supply chain disruption. We are already seeing falsified COVID-19 diagnostic tests, vaccines and medicines but when the evidence base for which of these products are the most efficacious is clearer, the issue will inevitably get significantly worse due to the immediate unmet needs of 7.8 billion people, with great public health harm.
We are working to ensure that the MQM Globe detects these issues and are planning to develop a system for ‘scraping’ the websites of those medicine regulatory authorities who release alerts of SF to include these reports on the MQM Globe, giving a one-stop website for such information that is otherwise hard to efficiently search for.
The Medicine Quality Research Group is now publishing regular reports about SF-related COVID-19 medical products and COVID-19 vaccines.
Future projects
When efficacious medicines are available for COVID-19 there will be enormous demand form over eight billion people, that in the short term will not be met. This will precipitate a surge in SF versions of these products. We are therefore pre-emptively planning to investigate which portable devices would be most accurate and cost-effective for post-market surveillance of the vital medicines.
Find out more about the work of the Medicine Quality Research Group here and sign up to our newsletter to keep up to date.