ReadWriteWeb

The explosion in the number of health-related apps has opened many interesting possibilities for rethinking both mobile and personal medicine. But when the Food and Drug Administration starts a blog post by invoking the Apple slogan "there's an app for that," you know the results may well be "there's a regulation for that."

Indeed, the FDA is proposing a set of guidelines, outlining the types of apps that it plans to oversee. This won't be all apps in the "Health" category, but will include those that, in the FDA's words, "could present a risk to patients if the apps don't work as intended."

The Food and Drug Administration ordered the first enforcement action against a pharmaceutical company for its use of Facebook a month ago, directing drugmaker Novartis to remove a "Facebook Share" widget on the website for its leukemia drug Tasigna.

The widget was encouraging people to share content that misrepresented the drug, the FDA said in its letter, which it publicized last week. The letter also mentioned the "Share This" tool, which the agency said raises similar issues about other social media sites. But the offending text in the Facebook Share widget was drawn from the source's metadata, content that is written for search engines and usually does not appear on a web page.

Following the recent peanut-butter-borne Salmonella outbreak, the United States Department of Health and Human Services - specifically the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention - engaged in a heavy social media push to inform citizens about the health risks and product recalls. The result? The formation of the CDC Social Media Center, a new appreciation for the speed at which news travels via social media, and likely hundreds - if not thousands - saved from illness and death.