As well as a stream of overseas announcements, from some of the world's biggest companies no less, a number of important updates closer to home will keep the Square Mile very busy. It aims to have 95 clinics in Spain, Britain, Italy and Portugal by the end of the year.Mr Suescan, 53, who remains the majority shareholder with 50.1 per cent, said: "Last year, we performed 45,000 operations, 31,500 of which were breast implant surgery, liposuction or reparatory surgery of some kind."Typically, our clients will be aged 32 or 33, often middle class, with children, working, and financially independent."Breast enlargement surgery can cost up to £4,200, while a liposuction procedure costs between £1,700 and £2,000.. Buoyed by a local boom in breast implants, the company saw an 18.9 per cent rise in its share price on the first day of trading on Tuesday, closing the week 21 per cent up at €11.02 (£7.57). In typically flamboyant fashion, Dermoestetica's chairman, Jose Maria Suescan, brought 50 models dressed as nurses on to the Bolsa's floor for the launch.The Spanish are "the biggest consumers in Europe of breast enlargement surgery", he said, but added: "Many of our customers come from Britain."Dermoestetica recently paid £29m for Ultralase, a British company that runs eye clinics offering laser treatment. Regulators should not respond to emotive headlines with knee-jerk reactions. These may vindicate them in the short-term in the eyes of the public and some stakeholders, but in the long term it will have a detrimental impact on their reputations.Ragnar Lofstedt is professor and director of the King's Centre for Risk Management.
The boom in plastic surgery has now hit the stock market, with Spanish group Corporacion Dermoestetica enjoying a perfectly shaped float on the Madrid Bolsa. To sum up, it could be argued that Bextra and Vioxx should never have been taken off the market.Clearly, regulators need to work with scientists to ensure that the evidence for proposed controls is firmly grounded before a directive is put forward. Among them are Merck's decision to withdraw its arthritis drug Vioxx in October last year, and the US Food and Drug Administration's decision in April to ban another arthritis drug, Bextra (manufactured by Pfizer). This led a large number of doctors to encourage their patients to take non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen instead.
However, ibuprofen at that time had not been tested for cardiovascular side effects in the same way as the banned drugs. New scientific findings now show that ibuprofen-type drugs carry roughly the same increased risk of heart problems as Vioxx and Bextra, but without their beneficial effect of protecting the stomach lining from ulcers. What the authorities did not foresee was that the substitute chemicals would cause averse skin reactions. A possible tiny risk for patients in the long term had been replaced with a real short-term hazard for hospital workers, a classic risk-risk trade-off. Even more ironically, the World Health Organisation shortly afterwards confirmed that phthalates were non-carcinogenic to humans.There are similar cases of questionable judgement in the medical field.
