The world of medicines and drugs can indeed be quite interesting and exciting with new life saving and other drugs being invented by science. While this can be life saving and disease annihilating, there is also the possibility of many side effects resulting on account of the consumption of these drugs. There have been many instances of loss of life as well as severe complications due to patients being administered drugs that have reacted with their systems and caused many after effects. It is with a view to analyzing these effects that drug safety pharmacovigilance has been brought into effect as a field of medico-scientific enquiry.

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As the term implies, pharmacovigilance means being careful, alert and mindful of drugs. The specific emphasis in drug safety pharmacovigilance is studying the short term, medium term and long term after effects of various drugs. Drug safety is of great concern to doctors, patients and their families as well as the whole medical community and even the government. Nothing can be as devastating as a drug disaster and in the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) takes great pains to ensure that improper drugs are not released into the market.

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Clinical trials of drugs are generally limited and restricted in their scope as testing involves only a few thousand human beings. That’s the reason why even very severe adverse drug reactions like liver damage are often not noticed because the study populations are small. Post marketing pharmacovigilance makes use of tools like gathering data and investigation of case reports to recognize the association between drugs and their adverse drug reactions.

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When the drug is released into the market, it would be administered to hundreds of thousands or even millions of patients. It is here that it should stand the test of being after effects free. Drug safety pharmacovigilance precisely tests this.

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