FDA lurves new media
By Owen Morris in On the Web
Thursday, Feb. 5 2009 @ 12:00PM
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Unless I still get salmonella from a Clif bar or there's another outbreak, I promise this will be my last post on the peanut butter panic of 2009. Partly because I'm thinking about switching off of peanut butter to Vegemite (oh wait!) and partly because the FDA and CDC are releasing enough gadgets to make Q of the James Bond films happy.
First there are the CDC's badges seen below. You place the code for these badges on your social Web sites like Facebook and MySpace to "let your friends know that you support healthy choices and encourage them to do the same." It reminds me of wearing a Dare T-shirt in grade school to let the other kids know: Don't even bother offering this fifth-grader meth -- I'm drug free!
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It gets better.
Say you want to keep up on food recalls while also keeping up on your friends' weekend plans. Check out the FDA's Twitter page. The latest Twitter had the agency asking its 600-plus followers to retweet it. The CDC has a Twitter too.
The CDC has also made widgets that you can download to your own Web site to remind your readers of exactly what products have been recalled.
If
all that isn't enough, you can get the latest information from
CDC on Second Life (that's where I got the screenshot at the top of the page). According to the CDC's virtual worlds Web site, its Second Life
space averages about 200 visitors a month. Knowing the kind of things
people do in Second Life and looking at the CDC's avatar, I have a
feeling not all 200 people are coming just to hear about disease prevention.
If you can't keep up with the FDA after all that, it's no one's fault but your own. You have to wonder though: If the FDA and CDC spent as much time investigating outbreaks as they did inventing widgets and twittering, how many less illnesses would America have per year? I think I'm going to go ask that question in Second Life now.
The CDC has also made widgets that you can download to your own Web site to remind your readers of exactly what products have been recalled.
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If you can't keep up with the FDA after all that, it's no one's fault but your own. You have to wonder though: If the FDA and CDC spent as much time investigating outbreaks as they did inventing widgets and twittering, how many less illnesses would America have per year? I think I'm going to go ask that question in Second Life now.
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