About the Authors
- Warren A. Kaplan
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Affiliations Center for Global Health and Development, Boston University School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Pharmaceutical Policy, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
- Veronika J. Wirtz
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* E-mail: vwirtz@bu.edu
Affiliations Center for Global Health and Development, Boston University School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America, World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Pharmaceutical Policy, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America
- Peter Stephens
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Affiliations IMS Health, London, United Kingdom, World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmaceutical Policy Analysis, Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences (UIPS), Utrecht, The Netherlands
Competing Interests
WAK and VW have declared that no competing interests exist. PS is employed by IMS Health. IMS Health is paid by the pharmaceutical industry and governments around the world to collect, analyse and/or consult on patterns relating to the consumption of medicines. Since IMS data is proprietary data, we are unable to make public the raw data upon which we created our graphs (i.e., we cannot put the dataset in the public domain). However, the raw data is available upon request by third party researchers for non-commercial purposes at the approval of the IMS Health Global Health Research Program. There are no fundamental restrictions if anyone else plans to do the same study.
Author Contributions
Conceived and designed the experiments: WAK VW. Analyzed the data: WAK VW PS. Wrote the paper: WAK VW PS. Revised and approved final version: WAK VW PS.