19th French pharmacovigilance meeting. Health professionals and consumers are inadequately informed.

(1) Drug excipients can have adverse effects independently of the active substance. This should be borne in mind when a patient suffers recurrent adverse effects with drugs of different classes. (2) Elderly patients are particularly at risk of adverse effects when they take a large number of drugs or when the prescriber fails to estimate creatinine clearance. (3) At the end of pregnancy drugs taken by the mother can have adverse effects on the fetus and neonate, such as renal impairment with nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs, and a withdrawal syndrome with high-dose buprenorphine. (4) The incidence of Reye's syndrome in France is now comparable to that in countries where paediatric use of aspirin is highly restricted. (5) The lack of information on adverse drug effects aimed at the public and health professionals is worrying. Undernotification of adverse effects by health professionals needs to be addressed.