Accra, June 16, GNA - A one-week training workshop on pharmacovigilance, opened in Accra on Monday with a call on African countries to take drug safety seriously. Pharmacovigilance is the science of collecting, monitoring, researching and evaluating data on the effects of medicinal drugs, herbal and traditional medicines with the view to identifying new information about adverse reaction and preventing harm to patients. The training workshop, which is a follow up to a previous meeting held in June last year in Ghana, is organised by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in collaboration with the University of Ghana Medical School.

It has brought together 20 participants from 11 countries from sub-Saharan Africa, including Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Togo, Sierra Leone and Zambia, to co-ordinate the WHO programme for international drug monitoring and its growing number of member countries. Dr. Alexander Nii Oto Dodoo, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Tropical Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, said the basic fundamental structure was to ensure safety of drugs. He said so far six countries, including Ghana, were members of the pharmacovigilance for anti-malaria drugs and would soon research into drugs for HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. Dr. Dodoo said over the years, healthcare providers and patients in member countries of the programme had served as the main focus and source of data on Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR). The meeting would therefore review findings from member countries, find out how far countries were performing to look at how they could incorporate existing knowledge into the national programmes. He said regulatory authorities of member countries would also be alerted about the potential drug safety problems. Mr. Emmanuel Agyarko, Chief Executive Officer, Food and Drugs Board, noted that medicine was full of uncertainty. "Medical actions or inactions always carry some risk," he said, and called for funding in that regard to undertake research. He warned that adverse reactions to drugs did not show their potency as people claim and called on the public to always report such reactions to reduce the burden of complications. Dr. Joaquim Saweka, WHO Country Representative, said the country office through WHO/Africa Regional Office had been supporting capacity building in that area through technical advise, training and development of materials in the country and across the region. He said the training workshop should consolidate safety monitoring activities to create a pool of trained pharmacovigilance consultants in the sub-region.