Browsing by Author "Edoh, M."
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Item Evaluation of the quality of artemisinin-based antimalarial medicines distributed in Ghana and Togo.(Malaria Research and Treatment, Article ID 806416, 2014) Osei-Safo, D.; Agbonon, A.; Konadu, D.Y.; Harrison, J.J.E.K.; Edoh, M.; Gordon, A.; Gbeassor, M.; Addae-Mensah, I.This study, conducted as part of our overall goal of regular pharmacovigilance of antimalarial medicines, reports on the quality of 132 artemisinin-based antimalarial medicines distributed in Ghana and Togo. Three methods were employed in the quality evaluation – Basic (colorimetric) Tests for establishing the identity of the requisite Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), semi-quantitative TLC assay for the identification and estimation of API content and HPLC assay for a more accurate quantification of API content. From the basic tests, only one sample totally lacked API. The HPLC assay, however, showed that 83.7% of the ACTs and 57.9% of the artemisinin-based monotherapies failed to comply with International Pharmacopoeia requirements due to insufficient API content. In most of the ACTs, the artemisinin component was usually the insufficient API. Generally, there was a good correlation between the HPLC and SQ-TLC assays. The overall failure rates for both locally-manufactured (77.3%) and imported medicines (77.5%) were comparable. Similarly the unregistered medicines recorded a slightly higher overall failure rate (84.7%) than registered medicines (70.8%). Only two instances of possible cross-border exchange of medicines were observed and there was little difference between the medicine quality of collections from border towns and those from inland parts of both countries.