How safe should drugs be?
What does spotting new risks in approved medicines say about how effective regulators are?
Drug approval does not mark the end of regulatory attention. Agencies collect reports on adverse events after any therapy is put on the market, and for excellent reasons. A recent paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that roughly one-third of the 222 drugs approved by the FDA between 2001 and 2010 were associated with some sort of safety event in the years after approval. But what does that mean?