Drug trade names: a morpho-semantic study in resourcefulness and perfidy.

Abstract

Linguistic analyses of drug trade names are of interest because they reveal the challenges of uniquely identifying proprietary medicines and because responses to these challenges can have a range of implications: health (medication errors), commercial (compromised sales figures of specific brand names), and legal (protection of industrial property rights). Regrettably, and to the disadvantage of many stakeholders, these perspectives have scarcely been brought to bear on the trade in medicines in a complex environment such as Nigeria, which is a microcosm of environments in the developing world. Based on a corpus of trade names for three categories of medicines (non-opioid analgesics and antipyretics, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and antimalarials), we do a morpho-semantic analysis of proprietary drug names marketed in Nigeria. In part, our objectives are to determine how resourceful manufacturers have been in assigning trade names to drugs; to ascertain whether and how trade naming contributes to unfair trade practices and to the potential for adverse drug events; to identify challenges which drug naming practices pose to regulatory authorities and the legal framework within which these authorities operate. This morpho-semantic study shows manufacturers targeting a core of motifs or brand attributes, which are then encoded (often through blending and clipping) into trade names. It is a reflection of the resourcefulness of some manufacturers that they are able to propose different realisations of this core motif set, and thereby maintain some form of distinctiveness. On the other hand, we also see trade names that smack of perfidy or of an intention to cause deception. Remarkable in this respect is the conversion to generic of what is otherwise a unique name-part. This and some of the otherwise resourceful naming practices are shown, through a combination of orthographic and phonetic measures, to have the potential for causing confusion. The health, commercial and regulatory challenges such confusion raises are discussed. The study shows the relevance of linguistic scholarship to public health, thus confirming and extending some of our previous work: text analysis and childhood diarrhea (Antia, Omotara, et al 2003), terminology and animal care (Antia, Mohammadou, Tamdjo 2004), multilingualism and health planning (Antia & Fankep 2004), etc.