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Biotech / Medical : PFE (Pfizer) How high will it go? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BigKNY3 who wrote (6931)	2/6/1999 9:08:00 AM
From: Anthony Wong	Respond to of 9523

South China Morning Post: Warning of 3-year wait for Viagra Saturday February 6 1999 ELLA LEE Men flocking to public clinics for Viagra may have to wait more than three years for an appointment, a urologist at the Prince of Wales Hospital has warned. The Government gazetted its approval of the registration of the anti-impotence drug yesterday but the first supplies will not be available until early next week. Doctors believe that hundreds and even thousands of men will swamp public clinics. Private pharmacists also said many customers had showed an eagerness to get the drug. Dr Peter Chan Siu-foon, chief of the Urology and Kidney Transplantation division at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, warned that current resources were far from adequate to cope with the expected demand. The average waiting time for erectile dysfunction treatment at the Prince of Wales Hospital is 20 months. Dr Chan, also a member of the Hospital Authority's expert panel on Viagra, said patients not suffering life-threatening illnesses would not be given priority at public urology specialist clinics. Erectile dysfunction is common among older men, with 60 per cent aged between 40 and 70 in either a severe or moderate stage, he said. "The population size of this age group is around a million. Even if as few as 10 per cent come to us for Viagra, we are talking about 100,000 patients. "Public hospitals are only taking care of less than 10,000 erectile dysfunction patients. How can we possibly cope with this if people flood in for Viagra after so much publicity? You can imagine that the waiting time would be more than three years." Dr Yip Wai-chun, consultant urologist at Kwong Wah Hospital which has a male clinic, also expects an upsurge in his workload. But he was more optimistic of a shorter waiting period. "The waiting time is between four to six months here, it may increase by three or four months. "However, I believe that in the long term patients will shift to the private sector," he said. Lawyers for Pfizer, the maker of Viagra, have demanded that a magazine which named itself after the pill's Chinese name change its title. Baker and McKenzie said Waico Crazy Night had breached the law by offering free supplies of Viagra as a promotion. They said it should remove all pictures of the pills and containers. scmp.com