FDA Transparency Blog June 6, 2009

Here is a new blog that will certainly get some serious attention. The FDA Transparency Blog is a promising project:

The purpose of this Transparency Blog is to discuss various ways in which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could provide information to the public about what FDA is doing, the bases for FDA’s decisions, and the processes used to make agency decisions.  The blog is expected to run for the next six months (June through November 2009). We will provide blog posts and updates over the coming weeks asking for your feedback on these topics.  The first blog post is to inform you of this process and our policy.  Thereafter, we will be asking for your feedback on specific topics.

And I also have to mention the other side and its relationship with social media. Have you ever wondered why drug companies don’t use Twitter? Here is the answer:

To their credit, the blog over at GlaxoSmithKline responded to the story, saying “the FDA’s recent communications on sponsored links raises questions about how Twitter can be used to communicate about prescription drug products. For example, FDA has made clear that the short 100 or so character ad copy used in sponsored links cannot be used for anything deemed to represent what the product is used for, without also including the safety information about the product in the sponsored link – a difficult challenge in such limited space.”