Abstract

The Committee on Safety of Medicines has just distributed a new set of edited extracts from its Register of Adverse Drug Reactions to postgraduate medical centres, medical schools, hospital principal pharmacists, and area and regional pharmaceutical officers. Seven loose-leaf volumes contain the reports received by the CSM from 1964 until June 1976. Volumes 1–4 summarise for each drug the numbers of reports of the various types of reaction; volumes 5–7 contain the same reports arranged by the type of reaction. For example the two pages on ‘anaphylactic shock’ summarise 165 reports, including 51 fatal cases. The most frequently involved preparations were penicillins (36 cases), vaccines and sera (36), radio-diagnostic agents (34) and tetracosactrin (13).