Medicine Quality Monitoring Globe

Substandard and falsified (SF) medical products reduce the effectiveness of treatments, cause adverse drug reactions, economic harm and engender antimicrobial drug resistance – threatening the lives of millions. Global investment to improve the prevention and treatment of disease is wasted if the quality of the medical products actually used by patients is poor.

Current SF surveillance in most of the world is extremely limited and incidents relating to poor quality medicines are often not published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. The new Medicine Quality Monitoring (MQM) Globe helps fill evidence gaps with customised summaries of national and international newspaper reports on medical products’ quality viewable on-screen in French, Spanish, Mandarin, Vietnamese and English, and reports are available to download. The Globe also includes a new system for displaying regulatory and alerts webpages. These systems give early warning of new SF incidents, reveal the extent of the problem, how the media perceive and report cases, and may also shed light on how incidents can affect subsequent behaviours and perceptions. The MQM Globe supports national and international organisations to understand and raise awareness of the issue of substandard and falsified medicines.