A Survey of the Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting by Clinicians in Eastern India

Excerpt

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are a not-so-silent threat to the health of a nation. For a country such as India, with a population of well over a billion people and a plethora of new drugs invading the market every day, the reporting of ADRs should be on a war-footing. The bandwidth of ADRs is very wide, ranging from common and innocuous to life threatening and rare. Hence, there is no denying that the implications of some ADRs are nothing short of lethal. The current status of pharmacovigilance-related activities in India either by the medical community or the pharmaceutical industry as postmarketing surveillance is far from satisfactory. Although efforts were initiated in 1982 by the Drugs Controller General of India and subsequently in the 1990s by the Indian Council of Medical Research, it did not take up the desired pace, thereby re-emphasising a real need for effective monitoring of ADRs. This provided the backdrop for launching the National Pharmacovigilance Programme (NPP) by the Government of India under the aegis of the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation in November 2004 to provide a structured platform for nationwide ADR reporting.[1] …