Pfizer hit over new ads for Celebrex

WASHINGTON -- Pfizer Inc. is advertising its Celebrex arthritis medicine again, a year after US regulators asked the world's largest drugmaker to suspend consumer marketing of the pill because of links to heart risks.

Full-page color ads in US magazines last week featured 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.

The marketing may spur overuse of the drug, consumer groups and a US congressman said last week. 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.

''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," US Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, said in an e-mailed statement on April 7 after seeing a copy of one of the ads.

'' '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, in an April 7 telephone interview. Wolfe, a critic of the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA, hadn't seen the ads.

The FDA withdrew its request to suspend advertising after Pfizer strengthened warnings on Celebrex's prescribing information to doctors on Aug. 1, FDA spokeswoman Susan Cruzan said in a March 31 e-mail.

Pfizer shares rose 49 cents to $24.93 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.