Most countries have acceded to at least one global or regional covenant or treaty confirming the right to health. After years of international discussions on human rights, many governments are now moving towards practical implementation of their commitments. A practical example may be of help to those governments who aim to translate their international treaty obligations into practice. WHO's E...

Classical multicomponent preparations mostly derived from traditional usages in Western and Eastern phytotherapy have been under-evaluated for a long time as potential new pharmaceutical products. The regulatory scenario, in particular at the European level, has only recently considered these aspects proposing harmonized guidelines for the pharmaceutical registration of traditional herbal produ...

Background Little is known about the prices and availability of medicines for chronic diseases used by older people in the Asia Pacific Region. The objective of this study was to assess the availability and prices of essential medicines for chronic diseases in 11 countries, namely China, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Lao, Malaysia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. The study...

BACKGROUND • Early Access Programmes (EAPs) are country-specific regulatory processes which grant market access to unlicensed medical drugs to specific patients, under specific terms, provided that specific criteria are fulfilled • EAPs can be divided into two main types:  Nominative or Named-Patient Early Access Programmes are typically initiated by physicians for an individual patient in gre...

Taking notice of race is both risky and inevitable, in medicine no less than in other endeavors. On the one hand, race can be a useful stand-in for unstudied genetic and environmental factors that yield differences in disease expression and therapeutic response. Attention to race can make a therapeutic difference, to the point of saving lives. On the other hand, racial distinctions have social ...

The WHO Medicines Strategy 2000–2003 identifies policy, access, quality and safety, and rational use as its four major objectives. In 2001, our medicines activities focused on extending the evidence base in each of these four areas. We applied that evidence to help countries improve access to affordable medicines of good quality, and ensure that those medicines were used to secure maximum healt...

OBJECTIVES To establish how the terms recommended by the European Commission to describe side-effect risk in patient information leaflets (PILs) influences expectations of side-effects and to identify factors associated with these side-effect expectations. DESIGN A cross-sectional online survey was carried out by a market research company. SETTING Data were collected in England between 18th...