Kim’s public health blog

The AP (5/5, Werner) reports, “The Food and Drug Administration has found at least 20 websites that may be fraudulently marketing products with claims that they guard against or cure swine flu, an agency official said Monday.” One company, ReBuilderMedical Technologies Inc., has been given “48 hours to take corrective action or face criminal or regulatory action from the FDA,” “The last thing any consumer needs right now is to be conned by someone selling fraudulent flu remedies,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz. “The FTC will act swiftly against companies that resort to deceptive advertising.”

According to a paper (5 May 2009 | Volume 150 Issue 9 | Pages 613-618) in the Annals of Internal Medicine, “press releases often promote research that has uncertain relevance to human health and do not provide key facts or acknowledge important limitations.” Researchers examined press releases that 20 “academic medical centers sent out about their research, examining such details as whether they gave information on the studies’ size, hard results numbers, and cautions about how solid the results are and what they mean.” They found that “58 out of 200 releases, or 29 percent, exaggerated the findings’ importance.” Notably, “exaggeration was more common in releases about animal studies,” as 195 “included quotes from the scientific investigators” of which 26 percent “were ‘judged to overstate research importance,’” the study showed. But, the paper did not “look at how often exaggerated press releases actually resulted in exaggerated news reports.”