Guidelines to help detect and study counterfeit medicines

Guidelines proposed by a group of international experts will help better study the prevalence and geography of counterfeit and other poor quality medicines threatening public health across the world.

A significant proportion of drugs consumed in the developing world are of poor quality, many of which are counterfeit, according to the guideline's authors.

The guidelines, called MEDQUARG (Medicine Quality Assessment Reporting Guidelines), were published by drug quality experts working in Kenya, Laos, Thailand, the UK and the US.

Paul Newton, from the Wellcome Trust-Mahosot Hospital in Laos, and his colleagues reviewed previous work on the quality of medicines and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different study methods, including how to sample medicines for testing. They also reviewed how medicine quality studies have been reported and suggest a checklist of items to be addressed in future studies.

The authors invite comment on their guideline proposals, saying: "The objective of the consensus guidelines presented here is to guide surveys of medicine quality and how they are reported, and to provide a template for further development."

The guidelines are published in this week's open access journal PLoS Medicine.