E-DRUG: History of Central medical stores
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Hi E-Druggers,
I hope you can help a colleague of mine at Boston University. He is Muhammad H. Zaman, Ph.D., the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor who works in the, Department of Biomedical Engineering and International Health. He has done fascinating work on developing high tech rapid quality testing equipment to detect falsified or substandard medicines. He asked me the following question:
Do you have any documents/ information on when the WHO and others started the central medical stores concept? anything on the history of that would be most useful.
I found myself at a loss to answer this question. Apart from the different MDS editions and some articles by Anthony Battersby I could not think of anything useful.
Can any of you help me or Professor Zaman,
Many thanks
Richard
Richard Laing
Professor International Health
Boston University School of Public Health,
801 Massachusetts Avenue Boston MA 02118
Tel 617 414 1445 (Office) 617 435 7860 (Mobile)
E mail richardl@bu.edu
E-DRUG: History of Central medical stores (6)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The first WHO technical series hardly mentioned storage let aside a Central
Medical Stores. Unicef would probably have published some guidelines before
WHO because of their involvement with medicines. WHO technical series No.
908 of 2003 and WHO Technical series No. 961 of 2011 are among the rare
documents that specialize on storage.
The regional offices of WHO would have copies of country-specific
recommendations that WHO consultants would have produced on proper storage
and distribution of medicines in Africa. I remember having seen a few in the
library of WHO in Brazzaville.
In Mauritius, as in many other countries administered by the British, we had
a central medical stores well before independence i.e. in 1954/55. I
understand that before that time in Mauritius drugs were kept in a separate
place within the central (all items) stores that included spare parts,
books, foodstuffs, drugs, etc. The first report on the Medical Stores in
Mauritius was produced by a French Expert Mr. Talarmin and that dates as 1978.
Agathe Wehrli, former WHO technical expert, who was active from the 1970's
through the end of the 1980's would be the best person to supply information
about the WHO CMS developments as she is some kind of living archive.
Regards
Gerard Requin
Former Director Pharmaceutical Services
Mauritius.
<grequin@intnet.mu>
E-DRUG: History of Central medical stores (9)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
WHO , Geneva , essential medicines, has an excellent technical information system.
I suggest that Claude Da Re who is in charge of this in Geneva be contacted for information from WHO about CMSs.
Margaretha Helling-Borda
(Former Director WHO Action Programme on Essential Medicines)
Margaretha <m.helling-borda@bluewin.ch>