Underestimating the toxicological challenges associated with the use of herbal medicinal products in developing countries.

Various reports suggest a high contemporaneous prevalence of herb-drug use in both developed and developing countries. The World Health Organisation indicates that 80% of the Asian and African populations rely on traditional medicine as the primary method for their health care needs. Since time immemorial and despite the beneficial and traditional roles of herbs in different communities, the toxicity and herb-drug interactions that emanate from this practice have led to severe adverse effects and fatalities. As a result of the perception that herbal medicinal products have low risk, consumers usually disregard any association between their use and any adverse reactions hence leading to underreporting of adverse reactions. This is particularly common in developing countries and has led to a paucity of scientific data regarding the toxicity and interactions of locally used traditional herbal medicine. Other factors like general lack of compositional and toxicological information of herbs and poor quality of adverse reaction case reports present hurdles which are highly underestimated by the population in the developing world. This review paper addresses these toxicological challenges and calls for natural health product regulations as well as for protocols and guidance documents on safety and toxicity testing of herbal medicinal products.

[Update on the Mali Pharmacy Code: legislative section]. / Essai de mise au point d'un code de la pharmacie au Mali: partie legislative.

Due to colonization (1895-1960) Mali has been submitted, on the legislative and regulation plan to a corpus of numerous and scattered texts relative to pharmacy. It is essentially the Law AN XI of 21 Germinal or the 11 April 1803 Law; the content of Book V of the Public Health Code relative to pharmacy practice, of which some disposals have been extended to Overseas Territories, Togo and Cameroon in 1953; the 1955 Ministerial Order about the dispatching of the Retail Pharmacy in AOF; the 1960 Law creating the Board of Pharmacists in the Federation of Mali etc. After independence, the new Malian State while renewing the pharmacy legislation issued by the old tutor State which was not opposed to the new fundamental Law, has also set up, according to the political orientations of the moment, some new texts. In the framework of this work, we have collected all the legislative and regulation texts that have been allowed in Mali in the pharmacy area and in that of Studies in Pharmacy. We have examined those texts and proceeded to codify the legislative part. The present Code consists of 189 articles divided in 5 titles layed out in chapters and sections.

[Non-technical causes of fakes existing in Chinese medicinal material markets].

Non-technical causes of fakes existing in Chinese medicinal materials markets come from three aspects. Source of Chinese medicinal materials is complex and it is difficult to trace back to a source; lawless add impurities and use inferior goods pretending to superior quality and illegally seek for profit; supervising department lack strict blow and deterrent force is limitted.

[Technical causes of false and inferior species appearing in Chinese medicinal materials markets].

The result indicated that technical causes of false and inferior appearing in the Chinese medicinal materials markets consisted of two respects essentially. First, the men who violated the law and committed a crime used certain weak link existing in quantity analysis of country's medicinal standard. Second, it is difficult that basic units managing and using drug implement effective technical supervision.

Salud en democracia política de medicamentos / sss

Contiene: la política de medicamentos del gobierno constitucional de Bolivia persigue racionalizar el uso de los farmacos, liberarse del monopolio de las transnacionales, introducir los medicamentos genéricos e incentivar la producción nacional de farmacos, buscando la maxima utilización posible de materia prima nacional en una industria que no sea solo fraccionadora y envasadora, sino productora de medicamentos realmente fabricados en el país.