live with asthma. An average community pharmacy provides a service for more than 450 asthma sufferers. Research indicates that a large proportion of these patients are inadequately controlled. The Asthma Insights and Reality in Europe (AIRE) study showed that only 5.3 per cent of the population surveyed met all the goals of the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) asthma management guidelines. A...

Essential medicines are those that satisfy the priority healthcare needs of the population and are available at all times in adequate amounts, in the appropriate dosage forms with assured quality and at a price the individual and community can afford. Essential medicines are selected with due regard to disease prevalence, efficacy, safety and cost effectiveness. In most developing countries, th...

The first WHO essential drugs list, published in 1977, was described as a peaceful revolution in international public health. The list helped to establish the principle that some medicines were more useful than others and that essential medicines were often inaccessible to many populations. Since then, the essential medicines list (EML) has increased in size; defining an essential medicine has ...

The updated list adds 30 medicines for adults and 25 for children, and specifies new uses for 9 already-listed products, bringing the total to 433 drugs deemed essential for addressing the most important public health needs. The WHO Essential Medicines List (EML) is used by many countries to increase access to medicines and guide decisions about which products they ensure are available for thei...

BACKGROUND Research findings are increasingly being recognized as an important input in the formation of health policy. There is concern that research findings are not being utilized by health policy-makers to the extent that they could be. The factors influencing the utilization of various types of research by health policy-makers are beginning to emerge in the literature, however there is sti...

BACKGROUND Several World Health Organization (WHO) initiatives aim to improve the accessibility of safe and effective medicines for children. A first step in achieving this goal is to obtain a baseline measure of access to essential medicines. The objective of this project was to measure the availability, prices, and affordability of children's medicines in Guatemala. METHODS An adaption of t...

AIM AND OBJECTIVES To examine the concordance of the Libyan Pharmaceutical List of Essential Medicines (LPLEM) with the World Health Organization Model List of Essential Medicines 2009 (WMLEM 2009). METHODS The concordance between generic medicines listed in the WMLEM 2009 (standard reference list) and the LPLEM 2006 (comparator list) was evaluated. RESULTS The total number of Basic Essenti...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE The patient package insert is an important source of drug information. The aim of this study was to evaluate and compare the PPI of the anti-infective agents manufactured in Palestine with the imported equivalents. METHOD The selection criteria generated 15 different anti-infective agents available as 36 locally manufactured products and 15 imported equivalents. The d...

considering the clarification of negative effects of chemical medicine on human beings, tendency to use herbal medicine has been increasing. herbal medicines provide an important alternative to health the conventional medicines. the combination therapy, using both herbal medicine and conventional medicine, caused the herbal medicine to become more important than ever before. the present study e...