Visual assessment of antimicrobial medicine packaging and labeling quality in pharmacies of Ho Municipality, Ghana

Emmanuel Orman, Bridget Dzidzinu Ankah, David Oteng, David Mccarthur, Thelma Alalbila Aku, Araba Ata Hutton-Nyameaye, Jonathan Jato, Hayford Odoi, Samuel Owusu Somuah, Issaka Nii Amu Collison-Cofie, Yogini H Jani and Cornelius Dodoo

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 2, 1-20

Abstract: Background: Substandard and falsified antimicrobials threaten public health due to their role in resistance development. Pharmacies, as key access points for antimicrobials, can play a crucial role in detecting these products. In this study, a visual assessment tool which incorporates a novel packaging quality index estimate, was developed and used in pharmacies to evaluate antimicrobial packaging and flag suspicious products. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in 23 community pharmacies in the Ho Municipality between November 2023 and February 2024. The developed checklist contains indicators on registration compliance, language & medical information, batch information consistency, and product security of the antimicrobials. The tool was validated, and its use on randomly sampled antimicrobials informed the development of the packaging quality index from regression analysis involving weights determined from principal component analysis of the results. Statistical analyses were performed with SPSS (version 26.0) and OriginPro (version 2022). Results: The packages and labels of the 275 antimicrobials evaluated were antibacterials (41%), antiprotozoals (28%), antifungals (22%) and antivirals (9%). Most products were of foreign origin (58.5%) and labelled in English (98%). Significant variations were observed in the registration compliance and product security indicators by origin and antimicrobial class (p

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0342484 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 42484&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0342484

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0342484

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().