Future Challenges

While much progress has been made, much remains to be done. Merck is focused on addressing the following challenges:

• Health care reform: We will continue to support actively health system reform worldwide to help improve and accelerate access to medicines and vaccines.
• Product acceptance by purchasers: With the availability of many vaccines including ROTATEQ^®(Rotavirus Vaccine, Live, Oral, Pentavalent) and GARDASIL^® [Human Papillomavirus Quadrivalent (Types 6, 11, 16, 18) Vaccine, Recombinant], purchasers face a growing challenge to prioritize and balance scarce health care resources among childhood, adolescent and adult vaccinations. To inform and enable customer decisions, we will continue to work with partners to demonstrate the benefits of using of our newest vaccines and to assess immunization program effectiveness. Merck believes that outcomes data from ongoing demonstration projects will continue to show the public health and economic impact of our vaccines, as well as our medicines.
• Intellectual property: Merck will continue to advocate at the national and international level for strong intellectual property protection in developing and developed country markets, coupled with growth in our efforts to expand our supply chain through qualified local partners as a way to ensure affordable and high-quality supplies to all of our customers.
• Health care capacity: Lack of skilled health care professionals will continue to limit countries' ability to diagnose and treat disease and provide ongoing care to citizens. Merck will continue to work through partnerships to help strengthen health care capacity worldwide.

The content on this page was last modified on September 15, 2009.

Merck & Co., Inc., Whitehouse Station, NJ, USA, and Schering-Plough Corporation, Kenilworth, NJ, USA, are now one company. We have combined our global operations under the name Merck & Co., Inc. We are working to update our corporate responsibility Web site to reflect our new, combined, global organization.