Pharmaceutical Oral Presentation

The industry I have chosen for this presentation and to research was the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry develops, makes and sells drugs that are licensed for use as medication and other health related products that save the lives of many people every day from diseases and illnesses, sometimes just a simple drug used for cosmetic purposes or to help improve peoples lives, appearance and mental state and also preventative medicine such as vaccines. These products help improve peoples health internally and externally, internally there are medicines such as pain killers to help people cope with their pain, antibiotics to help kill bacteria and even the specialized drugs used in chemotherapy to help fight cancer cells. Externally there are simple things like burn creams to help heal burns or sunscreen to protect people from skin cancer.

Chemicals are often worked with in this industry as medicines and drugs are made of various substances, many dangerous on its own with no other substance to counteract the side effects. The people in the industry work mostly with living organisms like natural plants, fungi and sometimes synthetic products which are not living organisms. An example of a medicine derived from a living organism is the Penicillium fungi which an antibiotic called Penicillin is made from. A synthetic substance is an artificial substance made from a compound of several different chemical reactions. An example of a synthetic substance is plasticine which is used as a substitute for clay or phosphor a synthetic chemical that appears fluorescent.

Because medicines are mostly just made of measured parts of different substances mixed together they are not usually separated afterwards to find out what they are made of, that is done during the developing process. The few separation techniques I found were chromatography, evaporation, distillation, extraction and crystallization. Chromatography is used for detecting chiral compounds. A chiral compound is a molecule that has a non-superposable mirror image. Evaporation and crystallization are used to make the liquid ingredients and the medicine purer.

Many pharmaceutical processes involve the heating of materials such as evaporation, distillation, sterilization, extraction and crystallization. They help as part of the processes involved in the industry because sterilization is used to clean the containers that the products would be distributed in, extraction would be used to gather the essence of the substances used and evaporation and crystallization would be used to rid the medicines and the substances used of its impurities.

The industry has developed chemotherapy to treat cancer which has helped and cured many people. The industry also developed penicillin or antibiotics to kill or stop bacteria growth. This was seen as a few of the most important achievements that the industry had ever made.

There are many impacts on society and the environment when concerning the pharmaceutical industry. For example the chemotherapy has helped many people recover from cancer and become cured, the treatment gives anyone with cancer hope that it will cure them and they will be able to live their lives properly, the medicine made now a days has cured many people and increased our expected life age because the more medicine becomes advanced, the longer our life is expected to be. Also since vaccines are becoming cheaper more children in the world especially in under developed countries could afford to be vaccinated which would improve their hygiene and health. An example on the impact on the environment is that many plants are being protected because the industry uses them for their products, they are dying out because the plants are being brought out of their natural habitat for testing or that the earth might become more polluted from the nonbiodegradable packaging. The current negative impacts on the environment and society are mostly the side effects that the medicines might cause because it could be harmful without you knowing or the effects could be long term and the research might take much too long and the customers need it as soon as possible. A negative impact on the environment would be as I said before that the packaging might pollute the environment, since some companies test on animals it might kill the animals which affect the amount of animals left and resulting in the food chain to collapse, the medicine might damage the animal and cause it to be different or behave differently that would cause it to in danger. For example it could suddenly be allergic to the habitat it would normally live in or the food it usually eats and if the people testing on the animal let it out into the wild and it breeds with one of its own species then the whole race of animals might be in danger, this problem can even be applied to humans for example the H1N1 flu that killed many people because the flu was resistant to existing medicine and at the time and had no cure. Scientist believe that in the future the bacteria will adapt and will become resistant to antibiotics. They have named this theory superbug which could appear in any state for example a stomach virus, flu or a disease.

How people could resolve this would be to stop testing on animals, start to use recycled packaging or biodegradable packaging, make sure to check if the company or brand you buy from are a sustainable business, make sure you do not buy a new and untested drug and use well known brands and not ones that people could make at home by un qualified people. The government plays a big role in this industry. Any drugs in the market would have to be approved by the government on its effects or use, the way it was produced, how it was tested and how it is distributed. You would need a prescription from a qualified doctor to receive medication which would be the governments way of controlling the medication given to the patient.

The changes that have happened within the industry that involve science and technology is that the medicine made now a days is more reliable because the technology and science is more advanced which means the medicine made is more accurate.

In all, the pharmaceutical industry impacts on most of the things we do, in the way we think, talk, move, eat, sleep, look and live. Thank you for listening to my presentation.