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Pfizer Slammed For Resuming Ads For Controversial Drug

Pharmaceutical marketer Pfizer is under fire for running new ads for a controversial arthritis drug for which all marketing activities were previously suspended by regulators, due to the drug's links to heart disease. The drug Celebrex is being advertised in magazine ads that show an older man walking up baseball stadium stairs holding a boy's hand. The text says, ''52 steps won't keep you from taking him out to the ball game." In smaller print, the ad warns that the drug may raise the risk of heart attack or stroke. It was the addition of the warning that allowed the marketer to resume ads for the drug, but it's not enough for critics who contend that renewed marketing efforts will spark overuse of the drug. ''While Celebrex has not been pulled from the market, its risk-benefit profile is controversial and I question whether advertising a drug like this to consumers is good for the public health," said U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat. A consumer advocate went further in his criticism. '' 'Public health be damned' is basically what this amounts to," said Sidney Wolfe, director of health research at Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer group based in Washington. Celebrex sales fell almost 50 percent to $1.73 billion last year, after the Food and Drug Administration urged Pfizer in December 2004 to stop all Celebrex advertising. In 2004, Pfizer spent $117 million promoting the painkiller in the United States, according to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, a media research company in New York

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