Picture Fred, a 60-year-old man who has a few medical conditions. One of his prescriptions has run out but instead of visiting his regular doctor for a renewal, he decides to search the web where he finds several online pharmacies. One of these makes available a new drug, which is said to work better than his current prescription, and it is cheaper. He buys it. All is well until Fred starts experiencing some serious side effects. These side effects are what stopped the new drug from being approved by the FDA for sale in the United States.
While Fred and his specific situation is fictional, this scenario and others like it are very real. The proliferation of online pharmacies, some of which are engaged in illegal and illegitimate practices, can pose a real threat to consumers.
When there is a significant risk of serious harm to the public from purchasing unsafe, counterfeit and other illegal drugs online, the Bing team wants to help our users make informed decisions. With this goal in mind, we are rolling out a new set of warnings on Bing.com to give our customers more information about the dangers of visiting unsafe online pharmacies.
This warning will appear if a Bing user clicks on a pharmaceutical site that has been cited by the FDA as a fake online pharmacy engaged in illegal activity, such as offering potentially dangerous, unapproved and misbranded prescription drugs to U.S. consumers. We will be using the FDA’s public list of these sites, which is updated on an ongoing basis.
We currently use similar warnings for sites that are reasonably suspected of containing malware. As with malware, we will not prevent a user from visiting the site. However, the warning will caution users of the risks, and provide links to resources where the user can learn more about selecting a safe online pharmacy. We want to make sure that the information and warnings we provide are accurate. If the owners of an affected site believe they have been wrongly included on the FDA’s public list, that company has the ability to address this with the FDA directly by contacting the FDA Internet Pharmacy Task Force. Any site that believes Bing may have made an error with a warning appearing in its search results can contact us at Bing Support.
The list of online pharmaceutical sites for which we are providing warnings will grow and evolve. We will continue to refine our efforts in this area and look for more opportunities to help our users make more well-informed decisions as additional, highly-reliable sources of information become available to us.
The Bing team welcomes your feedback. Visit Bing Listens or tweet @Bing to let us know your thoughts.
-The Bing Team