Why is the Ministry of Health following statuses on Facebook?

Not only Internet giants, the Ministry of Health will also follow us on the social network: the Ministry of Health would like to find through statuses and calls on the network the reports of side effects from drugs. This monitoring will help them expand the information they have about the scope of the phenomena and hypotheses can receive reinforcements there.

The step is performed following the lessons derived from the Eltroxin case, a drug which caused side effect to hundreds of users from a change made to it. "Following the Eltroxin affair we created infrastructure in the future, if and when, in order to identify adverse events in time and deliver a report on the public caregivers and patients. It is important to locate those signals."

In the coming days clear guidelines will be made on the duty to report side effects from the drug companies and doctors.

Dr. Eyal Schwartzberg said to Yisrael Hayom: "Our goal is to separate a single signal and background noise from many reports coming. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack. We get about 50 messages a day from medication side effects. Within the pilot program we follow social networking and after statuses that say, 'I suffer from X and I taking such and such medication' so we can link the reports we received for more information. "

'בחדרי' גם ברשתות החברתיות - הצטרפו!