FDA Dings Zicam & Matrixx

FDA just issued an advisory about a potential link between certain Zicam products and the loss of sense of small (anosmia).

What's flabbergasting about this is that this information has been around for more than 4 years in the AERS system.

Here you can see that there have been 390 cases of anosmia reported to FDA where Zicam was also mentioned.

Here you can see that, by 2008, adverse event cases for Zicam reported anosmia ~1,000-fold more often than anosmia was reported in all other cases for all other drugs.


This signal is present as far back as Q3 of 2004.

FDA cleans its robots.txt file

In Late April I posted about how the FDA's robots.txt file had various peculiar sections, including a note indicating that one section was added at the request of Bristol Myers Squibb. Well, FDA recently (probably late May when they revamped the entire site) tidied up the robots.txt file removing most of the peculiarities (like "area 51").

The comment about Bristol still stands. The rest is now vanilla.

See for yourselves.

#Added for Bristol-Myers on Sept 2005
User-agent: vspider
Disallow: /

#For all other crawlers
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Management/ # don't crawl healthcheck
Hit-rate: 30 # wait 30 seconds before starting a new URL request default=30
Visiting-hours: 23:00EDT-05:00EDT #index this site between 11PM - 5AM EDT
Concurrent-hits: 2 # limit concurrent active URLS to 2 for each index server