Warning Letters Upgrade – a jumbled bag of some good but mostly bad

This picture pretty much sums up how I feel the more I look at the FDA’s most recent upgrade of its warning-letters & responses search-engine.

First, some background:

FDA used to have a collection of web-pages that allowed you to search the warning letters and responses that it had issued to various food & drug scofflaws and ne’er-do-wells all the way back to 1996.

There were certainly some strange choices made with the old system that they used. For one thing, they separated the “old” warning letters (those > 1 year old) from the new ones (<= 1 year old) and you had to use a separate search engine for each collection of reports.

With the new search engine, they’ve combined old and new so that both can be searched from one form. However, this appears to be the only thing that they got right with the upgrade.

Another peculiarity was that if you used the old system to download an Excel table of warning letters filtered by date, you got a CSV file that was mistakenly tagged with an .xls extension. This transgression is no big deal as CSV will be read easily by Excel even if it’s mis-tagged, but whoever built the new version seems to have taken the mislabeling one step further (see below).

If you dig deeper into the web-pages, you find all sorts of weirdness.

First, your searches are capped at 1,000 results no matter how big the true size of results. The search-form doesn’t say that it will only return the first 1,000 results, but it does. And this initially led to confusion on my part because I was trying to see if the system would retrieve all 9,000+ warning letters that should be in the system. It only returned 1,000.

This is a bit dangerous b/c if a user searches for all warning letters from 1996 to 2009 s/he may mistakenly conclude that there have only been about 1,000 reports issued. What’s the deal? I seriously doubt they’re low on computing power.

The same holds true if you try to download an Excel table of the warning letters (you only get 1,000 results) no matter what you try.

And here’s the really strange bit. Remember how I said that the old system delivered a CSV file that was mis-labeled as an xls file?

Well, the *new* system again lets you download what is ostensibly an Excel file, but it’s not an xls file. It’s also not a CSV file like the old system. And no, it’s not one of those new-fangled Microsoft Office 2007 xlsx files. It’s a file marked with an xls extension, but if you open it up with notepad, you’ll find that it’s HTML !




Specifically, they’ve packaged the HTML table that is returned when a user searches their web-interface for warning letters and passed it off as Excel. Why? I have no explanation, except sheer laziness.

Finally, this section of the FDA’s website is titled “Warning Letters and Responses”[emphasis mine] and there used to be a way to search the responses to the warning letters…and the downloadable 'csv' file would list the location of letters received by the FDA in response to their warning salvos.

This information is no longer provided. As an example, this response letter can be found by using the FDAble search engine and searching for aquaculture (see result # 22). It can’t be found with the FDA’s search engine.

Also, they moved the URLs for all of the html versions of their warning letters, thereby breaking all of the fdable warning letter links. It’s not like the FDA is legally obligated to inform me of these changes, but when they do stuff like this they end up breaking the links for anyone/everyone who has ever bothered to link to their warning letter data. (time for me to get back to work…).