For FDA, social media's still in trial phase

An army of tweeting thumbs and Facebook Inc.’s planned $5 billion IPO notwithstanding, Margaret Hamburg isn’t quite ready for social media.
“‘Social media’ is a scary term for me,” Hamburg, the top of the food chain in the Food and Drug Administration, told members of the Commonwealth Club this week.
That really comes as no surprise to those who have tracked the FDA’s laborious process for devising rules around how drug makers can communicate with patients using Facebook, Twitter and the like. Two years in, and all that’s emerged are very vague guidelines.