Source: www.nhatky.inThe front page of today's Philadelphia Inquirer has a thought-provoking piece on Roche's recent ad campaign raising awareness about hepatitis C.
The ads feature head shots of people with gruesome bruises and other injuries on their faces. The punch line (so to speak): "If hep C was attacking your face instead of your liver, you'd do something about it. Ready to fight back?" (Aside: As a professional editor, I have to point out that the ad's copywriter doesn't understand the subjunctive mood of English verb tenses, explained quite nicely here. The ad should read "If hep C were attacking your face .".)
As the head of liver transplantation at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Victor J. Navarro has seen many ailing patients with hepatitis C. But they don't look like the man in a half-page, color newspaper ad with a battered and bruised face, his eyes glassy. .
While Navarro and other experts applaud the ads for raising interest in the viral disease, they think the campaign by drugmaker Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. could cause unnecessary alarm, in part because the vast majority of hepatitis C patients will not die of it.
"It's a marketing tool to make people fearful of hep C," Navarro said.
In the article, Inquirer staff writer John Sullivan notes that while Roche's drugs are improvements over older therapies, they work on only half of all hep C patients and have a number of side effects. "The campaign could leave those who cannot benefit believing they will wind up like the man in the ad," the article says.
The article also reports that because the ad is part a marketing effort by Roche to "quietly sponsor hep C seminars for the public and support patient groups and many liver physicians," ethicists say the financing raises questions about whether the advice at such seminars can be objective.
While the ads don't specifically mention Roche or it's hep C drugs, Pegasys and Copegus, they do include the address of a Roche-sponsored Web site and a toll-free number.
