Further studies are needed to define the possible roles of MB in malaria treatment. Existing approaches to detection of rare but serious adverse drug reactions have limitations. Such associations are often too rare to be Oligomycin A detected in early clinical trials, and may not appear until after a drug has been more widely released. Postmarketing surveillance relies on the vigilance of doctors, or on prescription event monitoring of relatively small numbers of exposed individuals over a limited period, without appropriate controls. Failure to detect adverse drug reactions early increases the risks associated with drug development, with consequent Screening Libraries clinical trial higher drug costs, lower rates of innovation, and greater healthcare costs. Consequently, current systems of detection, verification and quantification of ADRs are disparate, reliant mainly on reports reaching the medical literature. Figures from the National Audit Office show that the primary care drugs bill in England increased from ��4.0 billion in 1996 to ��8.2 billion in 2006, with approximately 10 million statin prescriptions in 2006. Statins are widely and safely used as a cholesterol lowering medication and have been shown to significantly reduce cardiovascular mortality and morbidity in patients with high risk of cardiovascular disease ;, and cause serious ADRs only in a very small minority of patients. Adverse drug reactions are estimated to affect around 7% of patients or hospital admissions at an annual cost of around ��380 million in England. A recent article has reviewed the safety of statins in clinical practice, including myalgia and myopathy, from numerous clinical trials. However, risks may be underestimated as these are rare events which may not become apparent in smaller trials and it is difficult to assess risk associated with specific drugs. Further studies have identified significant risks of myopathy and myositis associated with statins and fibrates using different study designs, in both a US managed care group and a UK general practice population. The computerization of primary care in the UK may help in the development of new and more rapid methods of detecting adverse drug reactions in clinical practice. The computerisation of primary care has led to the creation of primary care databases with longitudinal medical records and drug prescription data covering several million people. In principle, it is possible to exploit these databases for a more direct approach to the detection of associations between drugs and adverse events, as ascertainment of adverse events can be almost complete in practices with good systems for collecting diagnostic data. Because primary care databases follow individuals before, during and after exposure to drugs, an alternative approach to control for confounding can be used, based on comparing the rate of adverse events while exposed to a drug with the rate of adverse events in the same individuals while they are unexposed to the drug.