The criminals call the victims — who in most cases previously purchased drugs over the Internet or via "telepharmacies" — and identify themselves as FDA special agents or other law enforcement officials. The criminals inform the victims that purchasing drugs over the Internet or the telephone is illegal, and that law enforcement action will be pursued unless a fine or fee ranging from $100 to $250,000 is paid. Victims often also have fraudulent transactions placed against their credit cards.

The criminals always request the money be sent by wire transfer to a designated location, usually in the Dominican Republic. If victims refuse to send money, they are often threatened with a search of their property, arrest, deportation, physical harm and/or incarceration.

"Impersonating an FDA official is a violation of federal law," said Dara Corrigan, the FDA’s associate commissioner for regulatory affairs.

"FDA special agents and other law enforcement officials are not authorized to impose or collect criminal fines. Only a court can take such action."
 

Drugs.com is focused on providing people with information to better manage their own health care and to assist in reducing medical errors. The site attracts more than 12 million unique visitors each month.

"The FDA’s partnership with Drugs.com means that reliable, useful, and timely health information will be available to an even wider audience," said Beth Martino, the FDA’s associate commissioner for external affairs.

"Partnerships like this are an important part of the FDA’s effort to ensure the public has easy access to reliable, useful information that can help people protect and improve their health."

The FDA’s partnership with Drugs.com will provide people with a joint resource on the Drugs.com site featuring FDA Consumer Update articles, videos and slideshows. The partnership will also offer access to FDA health information on Drugs.com’s mobile platform.

"We are very excited about partnering with the FDA to provide consumers with public health and safety information on our site as well as our mobile phone platform," said Philip Thornton, CEO of Drugs.com.
 

The CDD says few U.S. health consumers are aware they are being identified, labeled, profiled, and tracked on the Internet while they search or access information on specific conditions or concerns.

"The health and safety of U.S. consumers must be protected from inappropriate and potentially harmful use of digital marketing applications that have been embraced by pharmaceutical and health marketers," said Jeff Chester, Executive Director, CDD.

"It is essential that the FDA craft regulatory safeguards for Internet-related promotion, especially since interactive communications will become the dominant form for the delivery of health information and advertising to both consumers and health professionals."

The CDD asked the FDA to work with the Federal Trade Commission and other agencies to develop a set of policies for regulating the use of behavioral targeting and data collection in the marketing of drugs and health-related products.

The FDA held two days of hearings last November on the role of the Internet and marketing for regulated drugs. Chester said at those hearings, "pharmaceutical marketers purposely painted a sanitized, storybook image of social media marketing."

"Direct-to-Consumer Digital Marketing of pharmaceutical and health-related products requires the FDA to re-evaluate its standards for advertising practices, including what should be considered as truthful and non-misleading," he said.
 

FDA lab test found the counterfeit Alli has a different active ingredient, a stimulant found in prescription weight-loss drug. People using the fake Alli may be taking three times the usual daily dose of the stimulant if they are following the dosing directions for Alli.

This excessive amount of the stimulant may lead to stroke or heart attack in people who have a history of cardiovascular disease. Even healthy people can experience symptoms, including heart palpitations.

The counterfeit Alli product looks similar to the authentic product, with a few notable differences. The counterfeit Alli has:
   

• Outer cardboard packaging missing a "Lot" code;
•  Expiration date that includes the month, day, and year (e.g., 06162010); authentic Alli expiration date includes only the month and year (e.g.,: 05/12);
• Packaging in a plastic bottle that has a slightly taller and wider cap with coarser ribbing than the genuine product;
• Plain foil inner safety seal under the plastic cap without any printed words; the authentic product seal is printed with "SEALED for YOUR PROTECTION";
• Contains larger capsules with a white powder, instead of small white pellets.
   

Related Articles:

> New Government Portal On YouTube

> Prescription Drugs Still Easy To Buy Online

>FDA Cracks Down On Online Claims Of Cancer Cures

The FDA says none of the websites are for pharmacies in the United States or Canada.

The agency has sent 22 warning letters to the operators of these websites and notified Internet service providers and domain name registrars that the websites were selling products that violated U.S. law.

The FDA says in many cases, because of the violations, Internet service providers and domain name registrars may have grounds to terminate the websites and suspend the use of domain names.

"The FDA works in close collaboration with our regulatory and law enforcement counterparts in the United States and throughout the world to protect the public," said FDA Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D.

"Many U.S. consumers are being misled in the hopes of saving money by purchasing prescription drugs over the Internet from illegal pharmacies. Unfortunately, these drugs are often counterfeit, contaminated, or unapproved products, or contain an inconsistent amount of the active ingredient. Taking these drugs can pose a danger to consumers."

The FDA’s latest move was part of a coordinated, weeklong, international effort, called the International Internet Week of Action, aimed at curbing illegal activity involving medical products.
Related Articles:

> New Government Portal On YouTube

> Prescription Drugs Still Easy To Buy Online

>FDA Cracks Down On Online Claims Of Cancer Cures

The FDA has sent warning letters to 23 U.S. companies, 1 Canadian, and 1 Australian company asking them to stop selling 125 products that claim to cure, treat or prevent cancer.

"Although promotions of bogus cancer ‘cures’ have always been a problem, the Internet has provided a mechanism for them to flourish," said Margaret O’K. Glavin, the FDA’s associate commissioner for regulatory affairs.

"These warning letters are an important step to ensure that consumers do not become the victim of false ‘cures’ that may cause greater harm to their health."

The products being sold online claiming to cure cancer include ingredients such as bloodroot, shark cartilage, coral calcium, cesium, ellagic acid, Cat’s Claw, an herbal tea called Essiac, and mushroom varieties such as Agaricus Blazeii, Shitake, Maitake, and Reishi.

The FDA said the fraudulent claims made by the companies include, "Treats all forms of cancer," "Causes cancer cells to commit suicide!," "Target cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone," "Shrinks malignant tumors," "Avoid painful surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, or other conventional treatment."

The FDA is urging consumers to consult their health care provider about discontinuing use of these products and to seek medical attention if they have experienced any adverse effects.

Companies that fail to properly resolve violations cited in the warning letters are subject to seizure of illegal products, injunction, and possible criminal prosecution.

A full list of the companies targeted by the FDA can be found on their Web site.

Which isn’t much. I put that out there so others won’t have to.

I also make that disclaimer in advance of what is a grander, more important topic: To what extent is the so-called "Googlization of reality" affecting our understanding of the world around us? The answer may not be so available and everybody with a stake in it will give you different answers.

If you took the Internet’s word for everything, you might believe that Ron Paul is a Republican frontrunner or that the elephant population has tripled in the past six months (see Stephen Colbert’s "wikiality" social experiment).

Clearly, information on the Internet (even Google) isn’t perfect, and knowing your source is paramount, hence my opening disclaimer.

The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest (CMPI) is a medical industry thinktank, fronted by former Bush Administration FDA officials. CMPI released a study this week outlining the perils of relying on Google for prescription medication information.

“What we found was not only disturbing, but dangerous to public health,” said CMPI vice president Robert Goldberg. “For millions of Americans, Google has replaced the family physician. People trust, and make decisions, based on the information they find online. With few exceptions, the information we found appeared legitimate but had no medical authority whatsoever. In many cases, we found lawyers posing as medical experts.”   

For searches on keywords like "Crestor side effects" and "Avandia side effects" CMPI found:

• 65% of the first three pages of search results came from sites which were biased or contained unverified information.
• Almost half of the first three pages of search results belonged to lawyers and attorney referral services seeking plaintiffs for class action lawsuits.
• Zero official regulatory pages or professional medical organizations appeared in the inventory of results.

Crestor is a cholesterol medication made by AstraZeneca and Avandia is a type 2 diabetes drug produced by GlaxoSmithKline.

Many of the results also referred to "unmoderated" patient forums, sites selling or promoting "alternative medicines" or were sites run by, as CMPI describes them, "anti-pharmaceutical activists."

All of these concerns and findings are published in a 33-page paper entitled "Insta-Americans: The Empowered (and Imperiled) Health Care Consumer in the Age of Internet Medicine." Similar concerns were voiced about selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and their (Internet) relationship to teen suicide rates and links between vaccinations and autism.

"Much like our email boxes are filled by ‘spam’ urging us to collect millions from Nigeria or confirm our banking information from phony Ebay or Bank of America security sites, a lot of the medical ‘information’ on the Web is designed to sell, deceive or frighten, rather than inform," said Goldberg.

Citing a Pew report, CMPI 113 million Americans search for health information, but three quarters rarely check the sources of the information.

According to Peter Pitts, CMPI President and former Associate Commissioner for External Affairs for the FDA, "it is important to remember that not everything online is true. The Internet has made it easier than ever before for charlatans and quacks to spread fear and misinformation. Mark Twain wrote: ?’Beware of health books. You might die of a misprint.’ The same can now be said of the Web."

And that can really affect pharmaceutical sales. Because doctors were afraid of lawsuits and patients were afraid of, you know, death, Avandia prescriptions had declined by 60 percent as September 2007.

Of course, it could also have something to do with the black box warning the FDA put on Avandia about increased heart problems. If you use a less targeted keyword, like simply "avandia," you’ll find that official government warning (and one for Crestor, too), along with official pharmaceutical company pages, scores of lawyer-sponsored AdWords links, pages from WebMD, the Mayo Clinic, the New York Times, USA Today, and a group called Public Citizen which runs a site called WorstPills.org.

Pitts and Goldberg aren’t especially fond of that last group, and single out Dr. Sidney Wolfe, who runs the site, as a source of misinformation about Avandia. Wolfe joins several others with lots of letters behind their names on the site’s About page. Maybe it’s because Wolfe has a close relationship with Ralph Nader, that CMPI labels them an anti-pharmaceutical activist group. Who knows?

But Wolfe’s opinion of Avandia match a Cleveland Clinic doctor named Stephen Nissen, whose May 2007 New England Journal of Medicine article about the drug CMPI cites as a "common source of misinformation." Dr. Nissen’s viewpoint however is echoed by a Toronto endocrinologist in this more recent (December 2007) USA Today article.

So why fixate on these drugs in particular? You could present a number of theories. CMPI is partially funded by the pharmaceutical industry, the Lilly Endowment (connected to Eli Lilly) being one of the largest contributors. Patients shying away from pharmaceuticals is bad for business.

A clue could be in reporter Evelyn Pringle’s article about Avandia, the FDA and CMPI. Pringle labels CMPI as "a home for industry hit men who served in the Bush Administration’s FDA." Pringle explains in detail Pitts’ and Goldberg’s association with Manning, Selvege & Lee, a PR firm representing many pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, and with FDA spokesman Douglas Arbesfeld, who has a close relationship with GSK.

But I’m sure that has nothing to do with their opinion on what is misinformation and what isn’t.

The extra-cynical of us might also notice CMPI’s definite stance against regulation of the health care industry and any type of universal health care. Those cynics might get really crazy and suggest that by advocating a greater reliance on your doctor and the drugs he or she prescribes rather than moonbat alternatives cuts down on the perception that there are flaws in the health care industry in its current privatized state. Plus, with obesity rates the way they are, diabetes medicines are big, big money.

But that’s just crazy right?

Well, anyway, CMPI says to check your sources, especially those sources found on Google, the nation’s most popular search engine, where most online health research begins. Sometimes people manipulate the information to suit them.   
 

But you might also conclude that a variety of sources is a good thing. I could be wrong. After all, I did all my research for this article on Google.