Mexico City. Mexico is the country in the American region that reported the most deaths from Covid-19 in the last 24 hours and the second that registered the most confirmed cases, according to Cristian Morales, a representative in Mexico of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). When participating this Thursday in the presentation of the National Pharmacovigilance Program, Morales said that this realizes that efforts to care for people with severe forms of Covid-19 will have to continue to be deployed for a long time.
He added that the universal vaccination campaign against the disease should also continue and warned that once the pandemic is controlled, annual vaccination campaigns will most likely be required.
Morales said that efforts with Covid-19 and against other diseases require close pharmacovigilance.
He stated that in a context in which Covid-19 is projected as an important public health concern in recent years, pharmacovigilance will be an essential element to facilitate access to reliable information on vaccine safety and as an indispensable tool to generate new evidence on drug safety.
When presenting the new pharmacovigilance policy, Alejandro Ernesto Svarch Pérez, head of the Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risks (Cofepris), said that it conceives drugs as public goods that must be monitored throughout their manufacturing, distribution, storage, prescription, dispensing and even its falsification.
He said that the pharmacovigilance policy implements the lessons learned by health authorities as a result of the pandemic and pointed out that it focuses on ensuring that the origin and quality of the active ingredients used in the manufacture of medicines, as well as imported medicines, corresponds to what is authorized by the health authorities, to avoid the circulation of medicines with substandard standards in the market.
He announced that among other measures, Cofepris will introduce new coding systems for tracking and locating drugs, to facilitate the identification of their illicit use or falsification.
The National Pharmacovigilance System will be strengthened and an electronic prescription system for strategic drugs will be implemented, which will be applied initially for controlled drugs and will later be extended to substances such as antibiotics.
Hugo López-Gatell, Undersecretary for Health Promotion, said that Cofepris used to be “an entity complicit in disdain for the public interest” and that the entire scope of its competence “was disrupted by private interests.” He added that today there has been a reconfiguration and a reorientation of his work.
Source: jornada.com.mx, informador.mx, excelsior.com.mx
