The fateful "blue pill" of love, Viagra, the commercial brand of the drug sildenafil citrate capable of treating impotence and more generally strengthening the erection of the male sexual organ, is exactly 13 years old in pharmacies.
Viagra, since it entered the market (March 27, 1998), has become one of the best-selling drugs ever in the history of the pharmaceutical industry.
In its first ten years, the blue pill (from the same color as the pill) was used by 35 million men worldwide, who consumed almost two billion pills (1.8 billion to be precise .... but this was only up to 2 years ago, there is no last update to date).
In Italy alone, 60 million tablets were consumed in a decade. Italy is the third European country for consumption of Viagra after England and Germany.
Domestically, the Italian region where the most is sold is Lazio (about 750,000 a year), closely followed by Tuscany and Emilia Romagna. On the other hand, considering individual cities, the most "blue" locations were Pistoia, Rome and Rimini. At the bottom of this particular ranking are almost all cities in Southern Italy.
Some scholars have found that the greater or lesser consumption of Viagra in the various Italian cities and regions does not, however, depend solely on the greater or lesser erectile dysfunction of the male population of those places, but rather on a more or less positive and open-minded attitude towards sex.
For some time, moreover, there has been a consumption of Viagra (and similar products) even unrelated to pathologies and dysfunctions. That is, it would also be used by males without any physiological erection problem, who however seek the blue pill as an antidote to their own insecurity and any performance anxiety.
However, the invention of Viagra happened almost by chance, and not from research aimed at solving the problem of male impotence. In reality, the two British pharmacologists who created it in 1994, Peter Dunn and Albert Wood, in the British laboratories of the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, were trying to develop a drug to treat angina pectoris and hypertension. During the clinical tests, however, we became aware of the "side effect" it produced in male patients, until we realized its primary and absolute efficacy in reinvigorating the erectile organ. Designed for the heart, sildenafil, alias Viagra, has thus ended up being dedicated to the "other" organ of male sexuality. Viagra was thus patented in 1996 and on March 27, 1998 it obtained the approval of the Food and Drugs Administration of the USA, for its marketing.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012 – Telesanterno
