WHO Pharmaceuticals Newsletter
(No. 4, 2008)
As usual, the WHO Pharmaceuticals Newsletter provides you with the latest safety reports, advice, warnings and other updates from regulatory authorities across the world.
In adverse events reporting, Malaysia releases record collection figures for the past year even as the WHO database, Vigibase, announces that it has surpassed 4 million case reports. To mark 50 years since the thalidomide crisis, we reprint one of the very first reports in a medical journal to raise questions about possible teratogenic adverse effects of the drug.
The Annual Meeting of National Pharmacovigilance Centres was held this year in Uppsala, Sweden. This meeting celebrated 30 years of the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, 40 years of the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring and 60 years of WHO. The discussions from the Working Groups at this meeting are published under Feature. A short abstract of some of the safety issues reviewed by the eighteenth meeting of the Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety is also included.