Pharmacare Marketing, Product Safety and Intellectual Property (Essay Sample)

PharmaCARE Marketing, Product safety and Intellectual Property
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PharmaCARE Marketing, Product safety and Intellectual Property
The quality of pharmaceuticals and the protection of the intellectual property rights of the products produced by the Pharmaceutical companies assume a greater importance in the field of health care when viewed in the sense that the end product of the research into better products should result in the improvement of the lives of the consumers. The safety of these pharmaceuticals is guaranteed by the Food and Drug Administration. The intellectual property rights engendered in the products is protected by various laws, both municipal and international. The intellectual property rights that obtain under the pharmaceutical products may be classified into patents, trademarks and industrial utilities. Each enjoys protection through the various laws that are specific to the protection of each regime of intellectual property.
Questions on the quality of the pharmaceuticals are also treated with the same meticulous care, having regard to the fact that pharmaceuticals are used in the treatment of humans and thus there is an attendant need to have the products safe not only for human consumption but also for animal consumption. The debate on pharma-care thus is a varied and controversial subject matter, in light of the increasingly dominant culture of clones, fakes and frequent violations of health standards in the manufacture, marketing and sale of the pharmaceuticals. This study focuses on the varied opinions and regulations that have dominated the debate on pharma care, quality and the protection of intellectual property rights in the pharmaceuticals.
PharmaCare Marketing
To put pharmaceutical marketing into perspective, there is need to consider the background of marketing. The purpose of marketing is to paint the product in colors that endear it to the customers with the view to influencing that customer into buying the product. This is very pertinent in a free market economy where the rules of demand and supply operate. Customers will demand a certain product; a company will manufacture that product and then seek to influence the purchase of that product through purposive efforts that are geared at representing the product as the best in the market with the hope that this will influence the final decision to purchase that product.
This has led to the need to develop laws that regulate the manner in which the marketing of products can be conducted. There are laws in the contract which stipulate that the parties to a contract will not derogate from the terms of the contract .When an assertion that has been relied upon by the seller or the buyer turns out to be false or misleading, the responsible for the misleading statements will incur liability. These terms and conditions are usually implied and some are express. In the Sale of Goods Regulations, when the seller represents certain goods to possess certain properties and it turns out that these properties are absent from that product, the seller will be responsible to the buyer. This is usually qualified by the proviso that if the buyer had the opportunity to conduct due diligence and take reasonable steps to ensure that the product fits the description, then the buyer will not be protected by the law when it turns out that seller misled the buyer.
This is usually called caveat emptor, that is buyer beware. This assumes that the buyer and the seller are on equal terms when concluding the contract. In most instances however, especially when the buyer is purchasing goods that are sophisticated, like in the case of pharmaceuticals, the requirement that the buyer intended to purchase the product that was advertised might lose meaning since the avenues for the buyer to ascertain the quality of that product will be limited by the knowledge and technical abilities possessed of the buyer. In these circumstances, the seller is clearly at a stronger position that the buyer as the seller has more knowledge tan the buyer. This is where it becomes important to distinguish between mere puffs, which are statements that are not meant to be believed in, and those representations that are meant to be believed. In the construction of marketing policy for advertising and marketing of pharmaceuticals, where the seller, that is the pharmaceutical company has more knowledge of the product than the buyer, it becomes crucial that the marketing of the pharmaceuticals be guided along a strict regime in order to protect the customer from deceit.
In the United States, the advertising and generally, marketing of pharmaceuticals I closely curtailed. Manufactures are not allowed to represent their drugs as being capable of properties that they are not. It should be noted that pharmaceutical marketing constitutes the single most effective reason of influencing consumer habits and consumption. To this end, they are required to ensure that the marketing of their products is able to inform the correct consumption habits and not just consumption habits.
The benefits of pharmaceutical marketing are not restricted to consumption alone. Without marketing, it would be difficult to introduce new and effective pharmaceuticals in the market, helping reduce the gap in health care provision. For instance, in the marketing of a new Ebola vaccine, it would be important to consider the profuse marketing of the vaccine...