The Cincinnati Beacon - CityBeat’s Kevin Osborne plays politics with children’s health

In the style of Cincinnati media failing to cover the Heimlich medical scandals, CityBeat’s Kevin Osborne has a post at the CityBeat blogs that plays politics with a very real issue regarding the health of children. Sometimes, safety and health should trump political rhetoric, and the issue of medical branding confusion is a serious topic that should not be disregarded so off-handedly.

Osborne takes issue with this item posted in July by Justin Jeffre—who was writing before he decided to run for City Council. Jeffre wrote about a local marketing firm who had mounted an ad campaign for Kids’ Pepto. The problem? Adult Pepto has an ingredient that can prove deadly if ingested by children, and by promoting a product named “Kids’ Pepto,” Jeffre was concerned that branding confusion could put children at risk.

Jeffre quoted from a 2005 press release issued by Deskey employee Amanda Matusak that described, as he put it, Matusak’s excitement for “her style of studying children to better sell them products.”

Later in the item, Jeffre noted that Children’s Pepto doesn’t even contain bismuth salicylate. Still, Jeffre told readers, “While the kids’ Pepto does not contain this potentially life-threatening ingredient, branding confusion brought to us by strategists like Amanda Matusak could cause some parents not to understand the difference.”

Osborne goes on to criticize Jeffre (who is not a professional journalist) for not getting quotes from people at P&G, who make the product—instead only asking questions of the person responsible for marketing this product for children.

Next, Osborne does the unbelievable: he goes for petty politics and disregards the real medical concern here:

Jeffre was taken to task just days earlier on some local blogs for his investments in Wal-Mart, Viacom and General Electric by a blogger who happened to be Greg Matusak, Amanda’s husband. Greg, a frequent worker on local Democratic campaigns, had criticized Jeffre for railing against those corporations publicly while continuing to profit off them privately. Was the timing of Jeffre’s item on Pepto coincidental? That’s for voters to decide.

For Osborne, apparently, medical branding confusion is not a real issue worth considering.

An 8-year-old died, it was suspected, after receiving methadone instead of methylphenidate, a drug used to treat attention deficit disorders. A 19-year-old man showed signs of potentially fatal complications after he was given clozapine instead of olanzapine, two drugs used to treat schizophrenia. And a 50-year-old woman was hospitalized after taking Flomax, used to treat the symptoms of an enlarged prostate, instead of Volmax, used to relieve bronchospasm.

In each of these cases reported to the Food and Drug Administration, the names of the dispensed drugs looked or sounded like those that were prescribed. There have been others: Serzone, an antidepressant, for Seroquel, used to treat schizophrenia, and iodine for Lodine, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug.

Adverse events that can occur when drugs are dispensed as the wrong medications underscore the need for clear interpretation and better communication between the doctors who write prescriptions and the pharmacists who fill them. The FDA says that about 10 percent of all medication errors reported result from drug name confusion.

“These errors are not usually due to incompetence,” says Carol A. Holquist, R.Ph., director of the Division of Medication Errors and Technical Support in the FDA’s Office of Drug Safety. “But they are so underreported because people are afraid of the blame.” Errors occur at all levels of the medication-use system, from prescribing to dispensing, Holquist says, which is why those people who receive the prescriptions must take action, too. “Everybody has a role in minimizing medication errors,” she says.

It is imperative that practicing physicians should also pressurise pharmaceutical companies launching drugs with similar brand names to educate the pharmacists / chemists about the difference in their products to minimise the chaos. A concerted effort by all physicians to avoid prescribing drugs having brand names similar to an existing brand would be one sure way of sending a strong signal to pharmaceutical manufacturers to desist from such cheap marketing tactics which only causes grave harm to the already suffering patient.

Kevin Osborne wonders why Jeffre wrote about the marketing of Kids’ Pepto (and interviewed the person responsible for the advertising campaign) instead of contacting P&G, who creates the drug. I guess that’s really a question of who should be blamed for potential branding confusion.

We should point out that in these documented incidents of branding confusion, the drugs did not have the same ingredients. This is something Osborne indicates in his item, but he seem to miss the point that the different ingredients is precisely why branding confusion is so problematic.

If there is a “Kid’s Pepto,” why not just give a kid a smaller dosage of regular “Pepto”? Naysayers may here go on a tirade about reading labels, but the average person would never guess that Pepto can kill their child. And likewise, the linked items here show professionals in the medical industry making similar mistakes.

So why is Osborne writing about an old blog post now? Is this politically motivated? And should Osborne be playing politics with the safety of children? That’s something the reader will have to decide.

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