Cheap generic viagra

27-Mar-2008 : Yes you have read it right. Ten years have gone since the advent of the wonder pill that announced the beginning of a new sexual era.

Viagra, a cultural phenomenon, is the product of a brilliant sales job to an eager, ever-widening market - the Coca-Cola, as one urologist put it, of erectile dysfunction. Not that the blue tablet did not face flak. There were scores who tried to thwart the attempt of successfully marketing the drug by highlighting its side-affects but then did it matter? No it certainly didn't. As the happy users said - 'So?'

Sildenafil the real 'Viagra' straight out of the medical terminology was synthesized by a group of pharmaceutical chemists working at Pfizer's Sandwich, Kent research facility in England. It was initially studied for use in hypertension (high blood pressure) and angina pectoris (a form of ischaemic cardiovascular disease).

Phase I clinical trials suggested that the drug had little effect on angina, but that it could induce marked penile erections. Pfizer therefore decided to market it, rather than for angina. The drug was patented in 1996, approved for use in erectile dysfunction by the Food and Drug Administration on March 27, 1998, becoming the first pill approved to treat erectile dysfunction in the US, and offered for sale in the US later that year. It soon became a great success: annual sales of Viagra in the period 1999-2001 exceeded USD 1 billion and rest as they say was history.

In no time it proved to be an answer to the marital discomforts of men around the world. Ten years ago this month, wine glasses were clinking in bedrooms across North America, as men hustled to their doctors for a brand-new sex elixir called Viagra - named for "the Vigour of Niagara" and promising to get the job done without the dreaded stab of a needle or the drastic step of an implant.

By many accounts, the company behind it, Pfizer, created the thirst by spending many millions to embed the term erectile dysfunction ("ED") in the minds of men, through persuading their doctors.

What else can we say besides the fact that it is still going strong or rather stronger by the day!