Pharmacovigilance and traditional and complementary medicine in South-East Asia: a situation review
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World Health Organization. Regional Office for South-East Asia
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Many Member States of WHO's South-Eat Asia Region have a long historyand rich heritage of using traditional medicine. They have integratedtraditional medicine into their national healthcare delivery systems in manyways, and to varying degrees. Safety is always a fundamental principle inthe provision of any treatment and procedures. Given the reality of wideuse of traditional medicine across the Region, monitoring the safety oftraditional medicines becomes important among the priority areas of workin Member States. One of the common challenges that Member Statesface is how to establish and further strengthen the safety monitoringsystem for traditional medicine products, particularly with regard topharmacovigilance. This was highlighted in a regional workshop on theappropriate integration of traditional medicine into national healthcaredelivery systems, held in Pyongyang, the Democratic People's Republic ofKorea, from 20 to 22 October 2015. Regional action plans were discussedand developed in this workshop. One of the action points was to supportMember States to strengthen their adverse-events reporting systems fortraditional medicine by sharing their experiences of developing suchsystems. Accordingly, WHO's South-East Asia Regional Officecommissioned a regional survey on pharmacovigilance for traditional andcomplementary medicine products in 2018 after two country case studieson the subject were carried out in 2016. This report was developed basedon the findings of the survey. We trust that this survey report will giveMember States a quick overall perspective on the subject as it applies in theWHO South-East Asia Region.