Specialized marketing needed for some drugs

Ethics Forum. Oct. 3, 2005.

Does a drug marketed to a specific minority reinforce disparities?

In June, the Food and Drug Administration approved BiDil for use in black patients with severe congestive heart failure.

Reply:

The historic decision by the Food and Drug Administration to approve a medication for a specified racial or ethnic group ushers in a new era in the fight to end disparities in health care. The approval came on the heels of the African-American Heart Failure Trial, or A-HeFT.

A-HeFT showed that BiDil (a combination of hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate) reduced death by 43% and hospitalization for heart failure by 39% when compared with placebo.

The decision also has raised some question about the message that marketing a drug to a specific minority population might send.

I believe that, given the disparities in health and health care between members of minority and majority populations, the decision is ethically sound and praiseworthy.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Of all of the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane."

In 2002, the Institute of Medicine issued the report "Unequal Treatment: Confronting Ethnic and Racial Disparities in Health Care." The report documents that there is a difference between the quality of health care of minority and nonminority populations, even when those populations have equal access to services. The report highlighted the need to increase awareness of racial and ethnic disparities in health care among the general public and key stakeholders as well as among physicians and other health care professionals.