As the world globalizes, so should accessibility of health and environmental information. Private-public partnerships can lead the way.

         The new FDA bill provides both the public and pharmaceutical companies some of the information they should have possessed long ago.  Now drugs will be tracked for three years post-approval.  If enforced, this rule may prevent health disasters like the “post-marketing” vioxx fiasco.  The public will then be better protected against drug side effects, the companies from public and economic opprobrium that can destroy them.

         More importantly, the bill creates public lists of all clinical drug trials and their results.   Rather than hunting and pecking through endless computer searches and waiting at the phone for researchers who never respond, individuals with cancer and many other illnesses will now know where trials are conducted that treat their disease, even some of the outcomes. This information will directly save lives.

         Who’s paying?  In large part, the drug companies themselves, through user fees.  Many feel this will give them too much influence on how such information is generated, analyzed, and made available. Whether an administration, which has made a fetish of hiding facts, can change its spots remains an open question. 

         Big Pharma certainly obtains many benefits from this bill. Canada is America’s largest trading partner. But not drugs.

         The new bill bans Canadian drugs. One reason is that Big Pharma makes the large majority of their worldwide profits in the U.S., an outrage soon enforced by statute.

         Pharmaceutical companies will also be paid to study medications in pediatric populations.  Yes, they should have done so a long time ago.   Pediatricians should not need to treat children as “miniature adults” when their bodies are rapidly growing and developing.  Still, this is a net plus for public health.

         The bill does not address the obvious question - are Britons, Germans, Spaniards and Tunisians so vastly different from Americans?  Isn’t it time for clinical trial data to become available to all people everywhere?

         If you have a rare tumor, you should be able find out about all the global treatment trials of your illness.   The same can be true for pharmaceutical surveillance data.  Public health officials in Bangladesh or Ecuador should be able to instantly check the results for any clinical treatment.  We need to discover clinical problems early, not late.

         Viruses also do not respect national boundaries.  Bird flu goes where birds do.  Influenza surfaces wherever people may travel.

         China’s present difficulties highlight another problem of international disease surveillance. The Middle Kingdom possesses one fifth of the world’s population and particular animal-human ecosystems that make it the breeding ground for several major illnesses.  The Chinese were heavily criticized for hiding the significance of the SARS epidemic.  Many of the physicians who tried to warn the public were sent to jail.

         Yet the Chinese eventually did figure out the reservoir of animals from which the illness came. Using draconian measures, they eradicated the disease with a speed many nations might envy.  Their penchant for secrecy, however, continues to cost the Chinese and the rest of the world.

         Melamine is one example of how lax regulation and official obfuscation leads to rather unexpected results.  Another is the recent outbreak of deaths in pigs.  Pigs and humans share many diseases.  Any porcine epidemic in China is a potential threat to human health everywhere.

         Yet international databases need not stop at information involving drug treatments and looming epidemics.  Global warming will change the nature of environments and the prevalence of disease.  The hundred thousand new chemicals added to the environment since World War II must be tracked. Food is exported worldwide.  Water quality has long been an international issue.

         Private-public partnerships can do the work of creating useful systems information.  Google is an obvious place to start, as it already supports GPhin, the international epidemic surveillance system.  Integrating databases with database mining software should help us known much more about potential medical treatments and their side effects.  Such software can also begin to integrate information like weather, trade flows, environmental contamination, food and water supply data with public health effects.  Expert systems can generate hypotheses about which connections are important.

         Such data will do more than warn us of future risks to health.  They will also point out how economies and health are interknit, how industrial production and population flows change climate.

         We’ve done this sort of thing before. The human genome project has mapped basic human genetic information. Using public-private partnerships engaging cooperation and competition, we now know a lot more about who and what we are.   It’s time to get that information for +many other arenas and start putting it together.

         That could really save a lot of lives.

Dr. Matthew Edlund, M.D., M.O.H., director of The Center for Circadian Medicine, is an expert on applied public health, sleep medicine and psychiatry. A former professor at Brown and University of Texas medical schools, he can be reached via email to DocME@DoctorEdlund.com. And CLICK HERE to subscribe to our new Fitcast, via the iTunes Store.