Evaluating Pharmaceutical Information Quality in Sudan Amid the AI Proliferation and Social Media Infodemic

The pharmaceutical ecosystem in Sudan faces a critical challenge driven by the proliferation of inaccurate or incomplete drug information, a knowledge gap that has significantly widened by 2026 due to patients’ growing reliance on generative artificial intelligence for medication counseling without clinical verification. This study aims to evaluate and compare the quality of drug information circulating in Sudan across various platforms using a comparative content analysis methodology aligned with WHO and US-FDA communication standards. The analysis revealed a profound quality gap, where official national sources demonstrated high scientific accuracy but suffered from constrained public outreach, while social media and traditional oral transmission exhibited a critical deficit in safety warnings and structural dependence on anecdotal evidence. Furthermore, generative AI tools offered high structural completeness but remained highly susceptible to contextual hallucinations and a failure to align therapeutic recommendations with the actual medicines available in Sudan. The study underscores the urgent need to establish a centralized national digital drug information platform and implement algorithmic governance frameworks for localized medical AI deployment.