Medabon® Website launched

Source: http://www.medabon.info

Medabon® for Medical Abortion

Over recent years, Concept Foundation, a not-for-profit organization based in Bangkok, Thailand, has worked with its pharmaceutical partner, Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd, Mumbai, India to make this high quality, affordable product, Medabon® available for the termination of early pregnancy.

This is a key component of Concept Foundation’s mission to facilitate access to products for sexual and reproductive health of assured quality to people in lower and middle income countries at the lowest possible cost. It is working, in collaboration with governments and national and international non governmental organizations, on the introduction of Medabon® into health systems in several countries to make it a safe and accessible choice for women.

Medabon® contains two medicines, mifepristone and misoprostol, that are widely used for medical abortion. Mifepristone is registered in more than 40 countries for medical abortion and is generally used in combination with misoprostol. Although misoprostol is only registered in a limited number of countries for this indication, it commonly used in combination with mifepristone, at the discretion of a physician, which is known as “off-label use”. Medabon® is the first product to package the two medicines together and to be licensed as a combination product.

The current Medabon® regimen is based on data from large multinational clinical trials undertaken by the World Health Organization (WHO) and is consistent with guidance from WHO and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in the United Kingdom on safe and effective medical abortion. The recommended regimens are being updated to include the sublingual administration of misoprostol and are to be found in the Medical & Service Delivery Guidelines on this website.

Resource Materials for Health Care Providers and Programme Managers

Concept Foundation, PATH, and Ipas have developed a set of materials as a guide for health care providers and programme managers who are working to introduce Medabon® in their local contexts. The materials are also intended to serve a wide variety of audiences, including policy makers, the media, and women who choose to use Medabon®. The resource materials in this package are to be found on the “Information on Medabon®” and “Introducing Medabon® into national programmes” pages of this website.

These materials represent a consensus view of these organizations specific to the Medabon® product, which may differ from their own published protocols for medical abortion in general.

Several organizations worldwide are working on access to safe abortion, including medical abortion. The expert review of their staff and technical materials they have developed have helped to inform these materials. The documents in Emergency Contraceptive Pills: A Resource Packet for Health Care Providers and Programme Managers, developed by the International Consortium for Emergency Contraception, helped to provide a framework for this project. Special thanks go to the following individuals for their input: Indira Basnett, Marge Berer, Kelly Blanchard, Paul Blumenthal, Peter Fajans, Mary Fjerstad, Shireen Jejeebhoy, Shveta Kalyanwala, Meera Ojha, Melanie Peña, Swaraj Rajbhandari, Paul Van Look, and Beverly Winikoff.

These materials were made possible by generous support to PATH from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Copies of each of these materials can be downloaded from this website. For hard copies, please contact Concept Foundation at medabon@conceptfoundation.org.