LAUSR

Quality Assessment of 7 Cardiovascular Drugs in 10 Sub-Saharan Countries: The SEVEN Study Substandard and falsified medicines pose a serious threat to patient safety and public health.1 Studies on the quality of drugs have focused mainly on antimicrobial agents, such as antiretroviral therapy (for human immunodeficiency virus) and antimalarial medications.2 Although cardiovascular disease kills millions of Africans,3 to our knowledge, little published research has explored the quality of essential cardiovascular disease medicines to date. We therefore performed a quality assessment of 7 commonly used cardiac drugs (ie, an anticoagulant drug, a statin, and 5 antihypertensive drugs) in 10 countries of sub-Saharan Africa.