FDA Search Graduation Day

I posted earlier about creating a plugin for Mozilla's Firefox that allowed users to search the FDA and CDCwebsites and FDAble's search engines by right-clicking on a highlighted word.

Turns out that you can submit a plugin, but it's considered experimental until you've received reviews.

You also have to write a short justification of why your plugin is worthy of release to the public at large.

I'm happy to announce that, as of today, the FDA Search plugin has graduated from experimental to public.

How to use it?

1. download the plugin.
2. if you're on a web-page that contains a drug name or other health related term, highlight the term
3. right-click on the highlighted term and choose whether you'd like to use the term to search, the FDA, CDC or FDAble search engines.

That's it!

AERS & VAERS Reporting Frequency has Approximately Tripled since their Inceptions

A little bit of navel gazing today, but I decided to plot the # of reports submitted to the AERS and VAERS systems vs. Time today. There are small bits of information in the graphs shown below that might warrant further examination.

e.g., The # of reports submitted to AERS has almost tripled from 1998 to 2008 (11 years).

Is this a big increase?

I can't really say with any certainty, but it feels like an inadequate increase given the concomitant increases in the use of information technology over that period (e.g., the interwebs).

[Aside: Wolfram Alpha is being of no use in trying to find the change in internet usage over the years to serve as a comparison---okay wikipedia is telling me that internet usage from 1997 to 2007 has gone up almost 6 fold in the developed world...so I think my feeling is probably correct.]

Also...what's going on with those dips in the # of reports in the early 2000s?

Note that 1997 only includes data for Q4 of that year so it's artificially low.

VAERS
As far as VAERS is concerned, it looks mostly like a flat-line from 1991 to 2006 (okay it doubled, but that's over 16 years) and then there's a HUUUUGE spike over the past 2 years.

Is VAERS being "marketed" better all of a sudden, or is it The Jenny McCarthy/ Autism effect? Or both?

Updated FDA Search add-on for Firefox (WOHOOO!)

Just updated the FDA Search add-on from version 0.3.0 to 0.6.0 (I just make these numbers up as I have no idea what they're supposed to mean).

It's a pretty significant upgrade, so I doubled the version #.

What can it do now?

you can highlight a word or phrase and search

• the FDA's website
• the CDC's website
• drug adverse events
• vaccine adverse events
• drug safety analysis
• clinical trials
• FDA warning letters

Also has some nifty icons added, which took me 4ever to figure out how to add. Mozilla's xul documentation is horrendous.