The Medicine Quality Monitoring Globe: A public health intelligence system for collecting and curating reports of substandard and falsified medical products from publicly available Internet news media

BackgroundThe circulation of substandard and falsified (SF) medical products, including medicines, vaccines, and medical devices, continues to impact health of populations worldwide. Meanwhile, surveillance of SF products and data sharing are limited in most of the world, and incidents are rarely published in accessible databases. We describe here the Medicine Quality Monitoring Globe system (MQM Globe) for capturing, curating, characterising, and disseminating online media reports relating to SF products. The system consists of the curation environment and the Web application. MethodsOnline reports are acquired from search engines, direct feeds, and targeted extraction, in five languages. They then pass a series of automated content characterisation steps to filter and label them by relevance, location, and product. Reports are then reviewed by a trained curator staff, before being made available through a visualisation Web application. FindingsOver the study period from July 2018 through December 2024, we identified 11,000 relevant distinct SF incidents, across a broad range of geography, products, and categories. The automated relevance classifier exhibited precision of 37%, recall 90%, and F1-score 52%, for English-language content. InterpretationThe information captured by the MQM Globe is publicly available and can help inform public health authorities as situations emerge. It is the only publicly available repository of open source intelligence specifically on SF medical products. It can be used as an informational tool to trigger intelligence-led activities across law enforcement, customs and Medicine Regulatory Authorities. FundingThis research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [202935/Z/16/Z and 106698/Z/14/Z]. The authors have applied a CC BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. The Gates Foundation supported the development of the Regulatory and Alerts webpage and the adaptation of the Globe to respond to SF COVID-19 medical products. Research In ContextO_ST_ABSEvidence before this studyC_ST_ABSThe World Health Organization estimated that approximately 10.5% of medicines in low- and middle-income countries are substandard or falsified (SF). However, there is limited evidence on the extent of the problem, due to its nature, the weak regulation capacity in many poor-resourced countries, the complexity of global supply chains, and lack of awareness on the issue. To date there has been little analysis of publicly available online media reporting on events related to SF medical products. Added value of this studyThis article describes the development and assessment of a publicly available online platform, the Medicine Quality Monitoring Globe, for monitoring news media and regulatory agency information related to SF medical products events. This active and timely system curates and organises reports in five languages. Implications of all the available evidenceThis article introduces a tool that offers a new source of data for better understanding the global challenges related to SF medicinal products, and serves as an early warning system for incidents that may require investigation and action from regulatory authorities, health professionals, researchers and the public.