Introduction - Uppsala Monitoring Centre

government authority including performing safety tests was drafted but nothing
happened until 1938, when after the Elixir of Sulphonamide disaster in 1937, the
Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act was passed, which meant that they
controlled the marketing of a new drug. In 1941 the UK Pharmacy and Medicines
Act legislated against ‘secret remedies’.
2. Factors influencing the occurrence, recognition, reporting and
publication of Adverse Drug Reactions Occurrence
1) Numbers: the world population was much smaller and so there were fewer
people to be affected.
Table 17. The world population over time
World
Population
(100,000s)
5 50 100 200 + 310 791 978 1,262 1,650 2,519 7,000
(wikipedia.org)
[Copyright Alasdair Laurie (2007). Website held by the UK Copyright Service (registration number 269023).]
2) The life expectancy of the population was much shorter and therefore a patient’s
first illness was often their last and they did not live to experience more illnesses
and more treatments and more adverse effects. The increase in life expectancy
post 1900 has disproportionately increased the drug consumption because of the
increase in age–related diseases. The dates in the table are fallible as different
criteria have been used in each case, e.g. in 1950 the life expectancy in Asia and
Africa was c40 years and Eastern Europe had 10 years less in life expectancy
than Western Europe.
Table 18. Life expectancy over time
34 26 28 25 21 37 42 68
Men: 76.4
Women:
82.4