Drug companies may exploit new rules to promote their products to the public, an editorial published in the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin (DTB) has claimed.
However, the ABPI has confirmed that pharma has no interest in overturning the current ban on advertising medicines to consumers.
The DTB warns that the existing ban may be undermined by proposals from the European Commission (EC), which would allow drug companies new opportunities to present the public with information about prescription-only medicine through the Internet or yet-to-be-defined “health-related publications”.
The regulatory body MHRA is currently carrying out a public consultation on this issue – due to finish this week – but supports the principle of allowing the pharmaceutical industry to give patients more information about medicines.
“A key concern about these ideas is the intrinsic difficulty in distinguishing between advertising of prescription-only medicines to the public (which would still be banned) and proactive provision of non-promotional information about such products,” says the editorial.
In agreement with the MHRA, the ABPI has responded that it believes it is “illogical, archaic and indefensible” that drug companies are not allowed to supply information on their own products.
“The industry has no desire to advertise to the general public in Europe. However, the industry does believe that the ability to provide good-quality, objective, reliable and non-promotional information about prescription-only medicines is desirable,” explained an ABPI spokesperson.
“A search of the Internet for information on any specific medicine will achieve a large number of ‘hits’ – good, bad and indifferent. But one contributor will be conspicuously absent: the company that spent 10–12 years researching, developing and manufacturing a medicine about which it has unparalleled knowledge.”
The DTB cites negative experience in the US with direct-to-consumer advertising, where “infringements of rules on information provision have tended to be detected far too late and where there have been difficulties in imposing effective penalties”.
The ABPI, however, has pointed out that it is not direct-to-consumer advertising that is currently under discussion in the EU. It also emphasised the level of monitoring any information provided by a company currently undergoes, adding: “If EU proposals come to fruition, similar monitoring will – indeed, should – apply to information supplied by companies. Why would DTB wish patients and their carers to remain in the dark about the medicines that are so vital to their well-being?”