New medicines and other life-saving products must be made rapidly available to the people who need them, wherever they live. Most medicines are made by pharmaceutical companies in China, India, and the United States. However, regardless of where they are made, pharmaceutical companies should make sure that patients living in other countries have access to medicines. In order to do this, pharmaceutical companies need to register their products and ship them to countries where there is a need. If a medicine is not registered in a country, the product cannot be sold there. While this sounds like an easy procedure, less than one-quarter of recently launched medical products have been filed for registration in most countries that are in need of them.
The reason that many medicines are not registered is because customizing the registration to meet the strict requirements of every country can be a hard task for a company, especially since the criteria may vary from one country to another. Furthermore, the registration process can take a long time in some countries with poor healthcare systems. While registration in some countries can take a few months, in others it can take many years!

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