The World Health Organization (WHO), responding to complaints that medications donated to relief efforts are often useless -- or even dangerous -- has initiated stricter guidelines on drug donations, the Associated Press reports.

Criticism of such donations, emphasized by recent relief efforts in Kosovo and Turkey, have centered on the fact that many drug donations have been unwanted, expired, unlabeled or dangerous.

A WHO spokesperson told reporters that up to two-thirds of donated drugs are unsuitable for the situation, badly labeled or near their expiration dates, AP reports.

In one example, 11 Lithuanian women went temporarily blind after being treated with a veterinary medicine. The drug came with no product information, leaving doctors to try to identify it by matching the name to other products, AP reports.

During the Kosovo crisis, half of the drug lists only mentioned trade names for donated medicines. The trade names -- often used in only the donor country -- can be unfamiliar to local doctors.

Forty-one percent of donations in Albania during the Kosovo crisis had expiration dates less than a year in the future, AP reports. For some donations, the expiration dates were omitted. Eighteen percent of the donations consisted of sample packs and medications returned to pharmacies.

Rejected drug donations can be expensive to the receiving country. For example, it cost about $34 million to dispose of 17,000 tons of bad drug donations in Bosnia, AP reports.

WHO's stricter guidelines ask donors to respect the needs of the receiving country, use high-quality drugs and communicate with the recipients, AP reports. The guidelines supplement a 1996 WHO effort to establish drug donation standards.

"It is three years since the first guidelines came out, and it isn't clear that things are improving," Dr. Jonathan Quick, director of WHO's department of essential drugs, told AP.

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