Merck and River Blindness Case Study
Merck and River Blindness Case Study
Merck was one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. The company was about to lose patent protection of two of its best selling drugs, which had been a significant part of their $2 billion annual sales. They began putting millions of dollars into research (up to $1 billion) and within three years, Merck was able to discover four powerful medications. Profits weren’t all that Merck cared about. In fact, their founder believed that “medicine is for people. It is not for the profits.” He also believed that following the “medicine is for people” philosophy would lead to profits and had yet to fail. River Blindness is caused by parasitic worms, which can be found in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. These places are developing, so many citizens are poor. The worm larvae can enter the body through fly bites, with some people getting thousands a day. Worms can cause grotesque growths, but the major problem lies in reproduction when millions of larvea are released in the system. The resulting itching is so intense the infected have committed suicide. Eventually, the larvae may cause blindness. Two existing drugs could kill the parasite, but have serious, potentially fatal, side effects. The only safe measure available was inseticides that eventually lose potency with immunity of the flies. The average drug takes $200 million in research and 12 year’s time to produce. In order for companies to stay in business (and ease human pain), they must make complex decisions about which drugs offer the most promise. Investing timea nd money into drugs for rare diseases is risky as the population proportion is small. However, there are enough people with river blindness that there wouldn’t be a risk of too few people. Instead, the problem would be that the infected could not afford the medicine. Merck tested a drug, ivermectin, which effectively killed the parasites in animals. Ivermectin killed a worm in horses similar to the river blindness worm. The drug may be adaptable for humans, but would probably not turn a profit for Merck (Trevino & Nelson, p. 329).
Stakeholders:
The stakeholders are any party that is affected by the business and its actions. In this situation the stakeholders are the customers, employees, suppliers, the government, stockholders, and the community. I believe the most important stakeholders are the employees, customers, and the community. The employees are obvious the most directly involved and are directly impacted by the decision made by Merck. The customers are impacted in that they could potentially be cured from a life threatening disease. The community is impacted as creating a medicine to tame this disease will directly impact their civilization.
Corporate Social Responsibility Pyramid:
Organizations have four kinds