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At the recent ePharma Summit in NYC, Charlotte McKines, Global Vice President, Marketing Communications and Channel Strategies, Merck & Co, spoke on “How Digital is Transforming the Pharmaceutical Marketing Model.” She noted, “Customers are increasingly looking for information using digital to get information so you see… most of our customers, physicians, use the web to gather information, but more importantly they use the non-pharmaceutical sites to get information about our products. They really don’t have a lot of trust and value right now in pharmaceutical sites. So we really struggle… to really become a primary trusted source. We have got to get there because finding the right place and being in the right destination for our customers really does give us the competitive advantage.”
The New York chapter of the American Lung Association has launched a campaign to reduce aggressive retail marketing of tobacco to youth in New York City. A video shows local youth from Queens leading decision makers and the media on a tour of the rampant tobacco advertising they encounter. In New York State, the tobacco industry spends $1 million every day to market its products.
A recent review of the book “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun,” by Paul Barrett in the Washington Post described the book as “a story of innovation, manufacturing, marketing, money, lawsuits, power, influence, politics and a little sex.” Barrett “explains how the company was able to remain profitable despite allegations of corruption, tax avoidance and malfeasance. A seasoned reporter and now assistant managing editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, Barrett originally covered the more disturbing allegations of Glock’s financial and managerial irregularities in a series of articles for the magazine.
A Research Letter in last week’s Journal of the American Medical Association reported that blood levels of trans fatty acids, a substance with known adverse metabolic effects, fell 56 percent between 2000 and 2009. The study compared trans fat levels in adult white men in samples from the NHANES studies, a periodic assessment of the heath and well-being of a representative sample of the US population. In 2003, the US Food and Drug Administration required that food companies declare the trans fatty acid content on the nutrition label of foods and dietary supplements. In addition, some community and state health departments have required restaurants to limit TFAs and reductions have been shown in supermarket and restaurant products.
Last month, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) passed stringent new standards intended to boost the production and sale of electric and hybrid vehicles here and nationwide, reports the Christian Science Monitor. The new rules mandate that 15 percent of new cars sold in the state by 2025 run with zero or near-zero emissions. The result would be some 1.4 million electric, plug-in hybrid, and hydrogen cars on California roads within 13 years. Today, there are 10,000 such vehicles in the state. Perhaps surprisingly, automakers appear to be on board.
In a commentary in Nature, Robert Lustig, Laura Schmidt and Claire Brindis make the case that excessive consumption of sugar causes many of the same health problems as alcohol, suggesting that regulation should seek to put similar limits on sugar’s toxic consequences. Charles Baker, the chief scientific officer for the Sugar Association disagrees. “When the full body of science is evaluated during a major review, experts continue to conclude that sugar intake is not a causative factor in any disease, including obesity,” he writes.
