The role of misleading or scaremongering news media reports in causing drug crises is well known. Pharmacovigilance systems can play an important educational and preventive role through safety monitoring of products and effective communication about safety issues with health professionals and the general public. That failure to use an existing pharmacovigilance system in implementation planning and weaknesses in communications about medication could lead to mass hysteria and civil unrest might thus seem implausible. But this reaction happened in several regions of Ghana on Feb 12, 2007.