Showing posts with label clinical trials. Show all posts
Showing posts with label clinical trials. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Tuesdays are a busy day @ FDA


3 non-colinear points define a plane...and 3 Tuesdays in a row is enough for me to jump to 2 conclusions, but I think the first conclusion is correct and the 2nd conclusion has a good chance of being right, too.

Conclusion 1. The FDA updates its warning letters database by hand every Tuesday morning.

Why do I think so?
I have an automated ‘bot’ that fetches new FDA warning letters from FDA.gov daily, but recently (when I bothered paying attention to it) I noticed that most days it doesn’t retrieve any new warning letters.

Then I started paying attention, and for the past 3 weeks, my bot only fetches new letters on Tuesday mornings (EST).

Not Monday night (I checked).

Not Tuesday at 6 AM (I checked).

Only Tuesday mornings between ~9 and ~11AM.

So, this smells like a human who has a Tuesday morning to-do list. Task # 1? Push out last week’s warning letters.

Why this can’t be automated on a daily basis? Beats me.


Conclusion 2. Updating of clinical trial data @ clinicaltrials.gov is done by the same person/entity/thing at FDA. This conclusion is far more tenuous, but hear me out.

(admittedly weak) Reasoning?
Every day, I have another bot that fetches new clinical trials data.

Every day, the bot finds updated data around 10AM--Except on Tuesdays when the new data show up around 11:30AM.

Tuesday’s task # 2? Push out new clinical trial data.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

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.

Monday, April 20, 2009

FDA Search Firefox Add-on

Just tried to publish my Firefox add-on, titled FDA Search 0.1.0. What I didn't realize is that Firefox keeps your add-on in purgatory until some FF regulars actually review it, and only then can you nominate your add-on for inclusion in the public repository. Thanks to James Cook and his add-on, which I used as a template for mine.