Digital Pharma: Byte-sized roundup
pharmafile | July 12, 2010 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | Code of Practice, Digital Pharma blog, digi game, disease awareness campaigns
This week’s roundup includes a sexual health computer game, a powerful new search tool, US health apps and a reprimand for Pfizer over a legacy website.
This summer UK television station Channel 4 will launch a new computer game to raise awareness of sexual health. Privates is produced by Zombie Cow Studios, who describe it as “rude, funny, bitingly satirical and technically pretty accurate if you don’t count the tiny people or the germs with teeth”. Aimed at 14+ boys platform level the game aims to explore issues such as sexually-transmitted infections and the morning-after pill. It involves leading a gang of tiny condom-hated marines around people’s ‘privates’ and will be free to download for the PC from the Channel 4 website at the end of July.
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Wolfram Alpha has made a wealth of disease and patient-level statistics available following its assimilation of two major US health surveys carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The search engine can now be used to find answers to questions such as what drugs are most commonly prescribed for anaemia, what fraction of the US population is affected by lung cancer or even the diseases that co-occur with hypertension. So far Wolfram Alpha only contains a two-year chunk of the CDC data, but there are plans to expand this.
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The UK government has axed a £75 million anti-obesity advertising campaign and plans instead to use social media channels to help pick up the slack. Health secretary Andrew Lansley will also seek greater backing for the Change4Life campaign from the commercial sector, charities and local authorities. The campaign was due to run until the 2012 Olympics, but fell foul of the new coalition government’s austerity measures, which include cutting advertising budgets by up to 50%.
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A legacy website from Pfizer’s 2009 acquisition of Wyeth has landed the company in hot water with the UK’s Code of Practice regulator PMCPA. The menopause patient website, which was produced and sponsored by Wyeth, breached the industry’s self-regulatory Code by featuring outdated information about the risks of hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Pfizer was also censured for not presenting data on the use of oestrogen-only HRT in a balanced way.
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The US government has released a series of apps that are variously available for iPhone, Android and Blackberry smart phone, or as a dedicated mobile website. They include the Android-only Product Recalls app, which features FDA notices alongside a variety of other product recalls; the iPhone BMI Calculator for measuring total body fat; and Medline Plus Mobile, a mobile website for consumers to find health and drug information and explore health topics in English or Spanish.
Dominic Tyer is web editor for Pharmafocus and InPharm.com and the author of the Digital Pharma blog He can be contacted via email, Twitter or LinkedIn.
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