Slooooooow Sales for BiDil®Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, United States on 2012-10-05 01:46Z by Steven |
Biopolitical Times: The weblog of the Center for Genetics and Society
2006-10-18
Osagie K. Obasogie, Associate Professor of Law
University of California, San Francisco
Also: Senior Fellow
Center for Genetics and Society
Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that sales for BiDil®—the first drug to receive FDAapproval to treat a specific race—are unexpectedly slow. Marketed as treating heart failure in African-Americans, BiDil® was expected to generate $130 million in sales this year; thus far, only a little over $5 million has come in. Estimates show that only 1% of the 750,000 Blacks suffering from heart failure are using it.
There’s no shortage of explanations for why Black people are about as unlikely to take BiDil® as they are to name a newborn child Katrina…
…But, perhaps there’s another explanation that the Wall Street wing tips are missing: a sense of history.
During a conference I attended earlier this year on BiDil® and race specific medicines, an older Black woman in the audience stood up and said “If I were sick and somebody told me that they had a drug just for Black people to help me, I’d say to them: give me what the white people are taking.”…
Read the entire article here.