What is the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring?
The WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring started as a small project with a few countries wishing to pool their resources and information from spontaneous reporting of ADRs. The ten countries first participating in the project had organised national pharmacovigilance systems at that time. The Programme was established 1968 following the thalidomide disaster and the intention was to develop international collaboration to make it easier to detect rare adverse drug reactions not revealed during clinical trials. For over 30 years, the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring has collected spontaneous reports of ADR in a standard format from the national centres. The basic idea is that the scrutiny of such pooled data may detect some signals earlier than will be found by looking at purely national data. Since 1978 the Programme has been carried out by the Uppsala Monitoring Centre. In September 2005, 77 countries were collaborating in the Programme and eleven countries had
