The WHO Pharmaceuticals Newsletter provides you with the latest information on the safety of medicines and legal actions taken by regulatory authorities across the world.Drug safety problems not identified in clinical trials, known as signals are published in the Uppsala Monitoring Centre's SIGNAL document and shared with drug regulatory authorities. The WHO Advisory Committee on the Safety of Medicinal Products (ACSoMP) recommended that SIGNAL articles should be made public and shared with a wider audience. We have therefore started a new section in the newsletter, to bring you these articles. We must however caution that a "signal" is to be seen as a hypothesis together with data and arguments; it is not only uncertain but also preliminary in nature.

The feature article in this issue gives you the conclusions from the working groups at the thirty-fourth annual meeting of representatives of the national centres participating in the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring.