#47 Viewing global pharmacovigilance through the local lens – Salvador Alvarado & Matthew Barwick

And this is in some ways a special episode because we're going to discuss both pharmacovigilance and communication, as you said, Matt.

And the jumping point for our discussion is a film series that you produced, Matt, with help from Salva and others.

And the series is called the WHO PIDM In Focus.

It highlights pharmacovigilance challenges and success stories from around the world.

And now the WHO PIDM that's in the title of the series and that we're going to talk about extensively today is the Programme for International Drug Monitoring.

And what it is, it's basically a global pharmacovigilance network that UMC has been operating on behalf of the World Health Organization for nearly 50 years now.

That's really in a nutshell.

It doesn't even begin to describe the value of this international collaboration.

So, Salva, I'll let you do the honors and describe the program in more detail.

Tell us how big is it and also what does it mean for a country to be a member?

Yes, the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring was founded in 1968.

Everything started when a new medicine was produced in the 60s, the active ingredient thalidomide, to prevent difficulties to sleep and nausea in pregnant women.

The thing here is that the medical doctors, the obstetricians, started to realize that the babies of the women that were taking these medicines were born with the problems in the upper limbs and the lower limbs in a medical entity defined as focomelia.

And that's how the program started.

So it was an obstetrician from Australia that first realized, oh, but I have given this medicine to these women and then their kids are starting to experience this problem.

So he published this in a scientific paper and that scientific paper was read far away in the UK by other obstetricians that realized, okay, but I have a similar situation here in my country.

So they talked to each other and then after a more serious investigation they realized that it was actually related to the administration of this new drug thalidomide.

So as a consequence of that the World Health Organization said we need to survey the medicines and vaccines that are administered in our population.

So that's why in 1968 the World Health Organization created the program for international drug monitoring.

And then since 1978, as a result of an agreement between the World Health Organization and the Swedish government, we were founded, Uppsala Monitoring Center, as the WHO collaborating center to support the activities of this program.

And now in April 2026, well, we have 160 full members and 22 associate members.

And what it means is that a full member has shown to have a well-established pharmacovigilance, medicines and vaccine safety system.

And that most importantly share anonymized but clinically relevant data to the World Health Organization database for adverse events of medicines and vaccines that is called VigiBase.

And that is hosted here at Uppsala Monitoring Center.

Why is this important? Well, because it allows the national health authorities responsible for surveying medicines and vaccines in their markets to know what is going on in other parts of the world and then see if, well, the problem that is being observed in Australia is still relevant in the UK and then take evidence-based regulatory action to prevent further damage that might be caused by a medicine or a vaccine.