Oral Presentations

Excerpt

Introduction: The importance of pharmacovigilance in detecting rare adverse reactions to drugs is well known. Despite the obvious synergies between pharmacovigilance and public health programmes, there are few reports highlighting the benefits of pharmacovigilance to public health programmes, especially in resource-constrained environments. The implementation of a new national malaria policy in Ghana in 2005 was accompanied by strengthening of the existing pharmacovigilance systems to capture adverse drug reactions (ADRs) to anti-malarial drugs. The new policy replaced chloroquine mono-therapy to a combination of amodiaquine and artesunate (ASAQ) for treatment of uncomplicated malaria. …