How pharmaceuticals get their names
Giving a medication an identifier is a careful process that blends scientific naming protocols with marketing and regulatory considerations. There are two naming processes for prescription drugs… one that is used for the generic and the other, a proprietary name, that the brand utilizes.
For the brand name, the launching company will often working with a specialty consulting agency in order to achieve the desired market share. The chosen name needs to be highly recognizable so that it can be trademarked and marketed in a strategic, easy-to-remember way that is catchy and helps medical professionals quickly recognize the drug’s function. Think Viagra, Prozac, Xanax. This process can take years with A/B testing and global research in different languages to avoid unintended negative meanings.
Following strict guidelines that describe the active ingredients, chemical makeup or therapeutic effect, generic names are, on the other hand, assigned by the WHO, FDA or the USAN. The names convey the drug family they belong to very clearly—many with a suffix for easy recognition (example – statin).
Biologics have a different naming system where a non-proprietary name is combined with a distinguishing, but random, suffix to prevent medication errors and identify any adverse effects.
Source: Popular Science
Teenager takes on child marriage
In a role mirroring her life, a fifteen-year-old local schoolgirl, Michelle Lemuva Ikenv plays a thirteen-year-old child, Nawi, forced to marry an older man in an, award-winning film the movie depicts child marriage in Turkana, a rural area which borders Uganda. Here, one in four girls are still married off before they reach eighteen. The young actress is outspoken about her role, despite potential backlash from her North-West Kenyan community who’ll see it as a betrayal. She wants the movie to spark serious conversations as many of her friends miss all of their schooling because, “someone paid a dowry to marry them.”
In the film, Nawi gets top exam results but her father still sells her to a wealthy man for “60 sheep, eight camels and 100 goats” when she comes of age. Faking her period on her wedding night by smearing blood on her legs she escapes from her husband and runs to Nairobi to go to high school. However when she finds out her baby sister has been promised as a replacement bride, she goes back to confront her father.
Like all of the local children, Michelle had never acted before and thought she was signing up for a school play.
Writer Milcah Cherotich, won a Kenyan non-governmental organisation award, with the script. She claims her sister was a child bride at fourteen. Her film was selected as Kenya’s Oscar submission and is ready for international release.
Source: BBC
Embracing Dugnadsånd
After reading Emma Beddington’s recent article in a March issue of the Guardian, there’s a new form of hygge on the move. It’s not the cozy cinnamon bun, cozy slippers hygge that we’ve been on about all winter. No, this time it’s all about Dugnadsånd… the age-old Norwegian concept of community, cooperation and selflessness. Certainly this concept seems to be something we could all use right now. No blankets or candles needed… just informal voluntary and charitable effort and ‘community spirit.’
In these times of bare-bones budgets, cuts and tread-bare public services. Beddington talks about Dugnadsånd being the response that’s really needed. A form of collective action she suggests it’s the equivalent to the 18th and 19th century barn-raising, where no barns are built but individuals and communities come happily together to plug a variety of different holes on a very local level.
‘Dugnadsånd’ is simply about neighbours helping neighbours according to Meik Wiking, the CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark. Seems like anyone at all, regardless of who they
are, can be the beneficiary as well as the giver in the process. “Helping each other out through reciprocation simply makes the whole community much stronger, more resilient and I would argue, and also happier, Wiking claims.
Source: The Guardian
Photos: BBC. iStock. CanStock.
