Australian Drug Regulators Call for Revamp On The Pharmaceutical Surveillance

The drug regulators of Australia want the country's pharmaceutical surveillance overhauled, they argue that such a step could help to reduce deaths and disease that might be caused by faulty drug use .

The newspapers reported that the authority on prescribed drug subsidies, Lloyd Sansom, have said that Australia had already lost a chance of getting an early warning about the potentially lethal drug problems due to the ban that links the Medicare and other health records.

It was reportedly explained that if the information was not contained in separate systems, then Australia could have had an early warning of the links between the arthritis drug Vioxx and heart disease, that is suspected to be the cause of an estimated 300 deaths in the country.

Professor Sansom, the chairman of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee, announced that Australia had possibly the most comprehensive health records in the world. But he also added that the privacy concerns had prevented the linking of individual health details. He said that it would be possible to identify and link these information’s.

At a National Prescribing Service conference in Canberra this week he stated that the benefits of linking the data should be explained to people, who he then believes would overwhelming support it.