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The WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring was launched in 1968 as a pilot project of ten countries with established national reporting systems for ADRs. Since then, many more countries worldwide have developed national pharmacovigilance centres for the recording of ADRs and the reporting network has expanded significantly. Currently, a total of 86 countries participate in the International Drug Monitoring Programme. The Programme depends on a WHO Collaborating Centre based in Sweden (Uppsala Monitoring Centre), which is responsible for maintaining the global ADR database. VIGIBASE now contains more than three million ADR reports.
As part of its work, the WHO Collaborating Centre analyses the reports in the database to:
* identify early warning signals of serious adverse reactions to medicines;
* evaluate the...