1. Medicines regulation - ensuring effective medicines with acceptable risk

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1. Medicines regulation - ensuring effective medicines with acceptable risk

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Medicines constitute one of the most highly regulated areas in modern industries.

  • Everybody wants to be able to get treatment if they are ill. Therefore, we need medicines that are effective against the illness.
  • We do not want side effects from the medicine. This means that we want the products to be sufficiently safe for normal use.

The use of ineffective, poor quality, unsafe medicines can result in therapeutic failure, worsening of disease, and sometimes death. It also undermines confidence in health systems, health professionals, pharmaceutical industry and distributors. And money spent on ineffective, unsafe and poor-quality medicines is wasted.

Medicines regulation is a safeguard against this. In broad terms the task of medicines regulation is to protect and promote public health and guarantee to the largest possible extent the availability of efficient, safe medicines.