The Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission (IPC) recently entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) in Delhi for setting up systems and processes for reporting, analysis and monitoring of adverse drug reactions arising due to use of anti-retroviral (ARV) medicines in the programme.

This decision was taken following high level preliminary meetings to bring the ARV drugs covered under the national AIDS control programme (NACP) into the focus of the pharmacovigilence programme of the country. With this initiative, IPC, which is the national coordinating centre for the pharmacovigilance programme of India (PvPI) and NACO have agreed upon to work in a phased manner by first identifying the ARV units within its 150 established ADR centres and later scaling up the activities further.

Dr Kalaiselvan, principal scientific officer from IPC stressed that in the first phase of this project, they plan to identify the 30 anti-retroviral therapy units from within the 150 ADR centres across the country so as to co-ordinate and link them with their existing system. He added, “Following which we will be providing training for the ARV team in ADRs monitoring, reporting and causality assessment on or before January 1, 2015. In fact, IPC is committed towards ensuring further services by scaling up our initiative further by adding more ARV centres in other ADR centres as well by end of 2015.”

It is understood that the MoU was signed between NACO and IPC under the chairmanship of R K Jain, additional secretary, director general (CGHS), ministry of health & family welfare; Dr A S Rathore, deputy director general, care, support and treatment division, and Dr G N Singh, DCGI and secretary-cum-scientific director, IPC.

Ever since the establishment of ART in 2004, the national treatment programme had scaled-up provision of ART to about 796,269 plus people. Thus to make treatment more accessible, government had ensured that ART centres are located in tertiary or district hospitals and medical colleges. Through this initiative, IPC plans to bring all these ART centres under the ambit of the prestigious PvPI programme as outcomes on long term use of many of the anti-retroviral medicines are still not known.