The Food and Drug Administration maintains 11 crucial drug databases available to the public on the agency website. However, if you tried to look them up on Data.gov, the administration's flagship site for organizing government data, you wouldn't have any luck finding them.
The databases listed include this one, drugs@FDA, the go-to place to search for background information on prescription drugs approved for sale in this country. For newer drugs, it contains links to scientific documents used by the agency in determining whether the drug is safe and effective. (The database contains many gaps though, as ...
Party Time Shows Fundraising While Legislating is Widespread
Today the New York Times reports that the Office on Congressional Ethics (OCE) is continuing to dig in to its... View Article
Continue readingAvandia case highlights need for FDA transparency
This week’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee’s meeting on the controversial diabetes drug Avandia, which the New York... View Article
Continue readingKagan central to Clinton campaign finance reform efforts
Elena Kagan, President Barack Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court, was an active player in the Clinton Administration's efforts on campaign finance reform, a quick search of her emails--easily searchable and available here, thanks to Sunlight Labs--shows. (Click here to see a list of all emails that crossed her desk mentioning the term.)
Campaign finance reform was one of two ideas she gave to her boss, White House Counsel Abner Mikvah, as a topic that would keep her "amused," and make "good use" of her.
After she started work at the White House in 1995 she wrote in ...
OGD: FDA to launch product recall database
When salmonella outbreaks were discovered last year in peanut butter and
pistachios, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took action by
posting information about affected products on its web page,
creating a widget where consumers could do look-ups, and providing a
downloadable database of the information--all of which proved tremendously popular. Starting this fall, the public will have access to a similar database containing details about all food, drug, and medical device recalls that occurred throughout the year, according to agency officials.
This database, which will be available to download in xml format, as well as via a ...
“Heart of the Matter” wins honorable mention
We are honored to announce that our investigation, "Heart of the Matter: How Congress and Special Interests Kept Crucial Clinical Trial Data Secret," has won an honorable mention in the sixteenth annual health care journalism awards sponsored by the National Institute for Health Care Management (NICHM) Foundation.
The contest, which was decided by an independent panel of judges, "recognizes the talented researchers and journalists who serve as a catalysts for positive change by advancing and informing the health care policy debate," according to the NIHCM's press release.
“Heart of the Matter” Finalist for Journalism Award
We're honored to announce that our investigative piece, "The Heart of the Matter: How Congress and Special Interests Kept Crucial Clinical Trial Data Secret," is a finalist for the NIHCM Foundation's Sixteenth Annual Health Care Journalism Award.
In "Heart of the Matter," we reported on the story of Bray Patrick-Lake, who participated in a clinical trial to test a heart device. After she had the device implanted, the manufacturer canceled the trial. Thanks to a successful lobbying campaign a few years before, the medical device industry had weakened legislation that would have required them to release clinical trial ...
OGD: Freeing health care data
We're still tracking government's performance under the Open Government Directive, and we're also asking for specific information to be released. Here's the data we'd like to see on food and drug safety, which we posted over at the Department of Health and Human Services "open" Web page. The agency set up this commenting system as part of President Barack Obama's open government directive. Please take a moment to visit and vote for our suggestions. (Unfortunately the HHS comment format made our paragraphs run together and slightly truncated our comment. This is fixed below.) We ...
Continue readingU.S. Sugar’s Sweet Deal
In the everything that's old is new again department, today The New York Times reports that Florida's ailing U.S. Sugar Corporation stands to profit mightily from a deal originally meant to preserve the Everglades:
The proposal was downsized only five months after it was announced. By April 2009, amid the deepening recession, the state said it could afford to purchase only 72,800 acres of United States Sugars land, for $536 million. The company would stay in business and the state would retain the option of buying the remaining 107,000 acres at a future date.Continue readingUnited ...
D.C. lobbyists drive Burr’s fundraising
Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., formally announced his reelection bid on Feb. 22, 2010, with an open house at his Winston-Salem campaign headquarters, but the first term member has been raising money since he took office. Since January 2009 alone, he and his campaign have sent out at least 38 invitations to fundraisers, according to our Party Time database, the great majority of them in Washington, D.C. The events have helped him raise a total of $6.7 million, $4.3 million of which he still has in the bank.
Lobbyists and Political Action Committees (PACs), some of whom ...
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