Anti-impotence drug Viagra is expected to land on pharmacy shelves by Christmas, sparking a rush to draft guidelines for public doctors prescribing the popular pills.
The Pharmacy and Poisons Board has given the go-ahead to imports of Viagra, but the drug must now be listed with other prescription-only items and approved by the Legislative Council before it can be sold.
Viagra researcher and urologist Dr Andrew Yip Wai-chun is drafting Hospital Authority guidelines on the controversial drug ahead of a policy meeting this month. 'We have to be very careful in formulating policy,' Dr Yip said yesterday. 'Once the drug is on the market, if you have no controls and no protocols, it will be a mess.' About 200,000 men in Hong Kong are believed to be impotent and many are expected to seek prescriptions for Viagra following its release. Genuine impotence can be determined by simple tests, but doctors face problems calculating how many pills to prescribe for each patient.
'I don't know if I should give a patient two pills a month, four, or 10,' Dr Yip said. 'You're talking about a drug which could cost up to $100 a tablet in Hong Kong. And will there be a category of patients for whom the Hospital Authority or the Government needs to pay for this medication?' He said the global hype surrounding Viagra created a danger of people trying to make money by suggesting that Viagra was an aphrodisiac. 'It only helps men who have a problem,' he said.
'A lot of people think this is an aphrodisiac and that it will boost desire and so on. It won't.
'We're trying not to have the situation we had three or four years ago, when we had doctors selling hypnotics.' One of the most crucial issues for this month's policy meeting is to decide who would pay for the drug.