FDA Targets (and Retargets) Web Detritus

In an ongoing effort to protect consumers from fraudulent cancer treatments, the FDA sent warning letters to 25 web-based businesses from April 17 to June 9. The warned companies or entities and a list of their 125 "fake cancer 'cure' products" were posted yesterday at the FDA web site. These letters follow a series of warning letters sent by the FTC earlier this year to 112 web sites, which falsely promoted cancer treatments, says the FDA. Consumer complaints and a web search performed by the FDA, FTC, and members of the Mexico-US-Canada Health Fraud Working Group prompted the overdue crackdown.

At least 3 of the targeted entities are already known to the FDA. A search of warning letters at Casewatch indicates that Vitasalus Inc (Nu-Gen Nutrition), Vitapurity, and H&L Worldwide all received earlier letters from the FDA, which claimed that the businesses promoted products for the "cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of diseases" in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. These repeat warnings do not necessarily include the numerous instances in which companies have fraudulently hawked the same products—for example, "Coral Calcium" or "Curcumin"—in rotating fashion as disease treatments.

An FDA warning letter sent to Vitasalus (Nu-Gen Nutrition) in May 2002 cited a single website, cancerchoices.com, and the product Squalamax. However, the most recent FDA letter cites 7 websites and 6 other products, in addition to Squalamax. A Wayback search reveals that 6 of the 7 Vitasalus websites named this year existed in 2002. The 2 other companies, H&L Worldwide (Chang Li) and Vitapurity (Otto Roder), have evidently not moved their cyber or land-based addresses since the time of their FDA warning letters in 2004 and 2005, respectively. Given the number of products promoted by each company and those cited by the FDA this year, business does not seem to have suffered for either company in the interim.