Monitoring system for substandard detection of antituberculosis drugs used in the Mauritanian National Health System

Abstract

Global sales of medicines have risen from US$ 500 billion to US$ 1.1 trillion in 15 years. This growth it is related with the inclusion of substandard and falsifi ed medicines in the pharmaceutical market. These medicines can prolong illness, promote drug-resistant infections or could make people die because of being untreated or killed by the product itself [1]. From 2013 to 2017, 1450 reports were received by The World Health Global Surveillance and Monitoring System, being 42% from the African region. The highest percentage of all products reported belongs to medicines to treat malaria and antibiotics, 19.6 and 16.9% respectively [1]. Nowadays it is not possible to know the absolute number of substandard and falsifi ed medical products worldwide as the notifi cations comes from the national or regional medicines regulatory authorities and they need to be trained to identify and report incidents. However, it is not always possible to have the possibility of having a laboratory accredited by the World Health Organization (WHO) for the detection of substandard and falsifi ed drugs [1]. Faced with this situation, the ISACAM project arises to develop a system that ensures the quality of drugs used in the treatment of tuberculosis (TB), AIDS and Malaria, in collaboration with the Laboratoire National de Contrôle de la Qualité des Médicaments in Mauritania (LNCQM). In addition, another objective is to collaborate so that the LNCQM achieves the accreditation of the WHO as a reference laboratory in the country for the detection of substandard and falsifi ed drugs. The objective of this work was to analyze the quality of antiTB drugs used in the Mauritanian National Health System.