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

Journal article

The 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. Online 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. Over 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. The 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.

Authors: Freifeld, CC; Van Assche, K; Olliaro, A; Battain, M; Kitignavong, I

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Public Library of Science
• Journal: PLOS Digital Health
• Volume: 5
• Issue: 9
• Pages: e0001648-e0001648
• Publication date: 2026-09-15
• Acceptance date: 2026-07-22
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pdig.0001648
• EISSN: 2767-3170
• ISSN: 2767-3170
• Language: English
• Keywords: Relevance (law); Globe; Dissemination; Quality (philosophy); Public health; The Internet; Web application