FDA announced it formed an agreement with health-information provider WebMD designed to help FDA distribute safety information to consumers. FDA will use pages of WebMD.com to post consumer information, alerts and recalls, and FDA’s information will also appear in WebMD the Magazine.

In a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the agency and the for-profit health information website, the partnership was called “a cooperative public education program.” As FDA’s news release explains, the joint effort helps the agency achieve its mission of informing the public of health issues in a timely fashion by leveraging WebMD’s access to consumers. According to the MOU, FDA.gov receives 6 million visitors per month and only 130,000 page views on its consumer health information (and most of the 6 M visitors are industry people, not consumers). On the other hand, WedMD.com reaches more than 40 million people per month, and its bimonthly magazine is read by 7.8 million consumers.

If you’ve used WebMD, you know that a large amount of advertisements come with the territory. The good news here is that the terms of the MOU state that FDA’s pages on the WebMD site will have no ads, and that FDA information will be clearly marked on the website and in the magazine. The focus for FDA is on gaining the ability to use WebMD to deliver its messages to the public.

“This is an important step forward in our effort to form partnerships to help bring timely safety alerts and other public health information to a wider audience in the most effective and convenient way,” said FDA Commissioner Andrew C. von Eschenbach.

I see where it is convenient for FDA to partner with a successful, for-profit website to get its safety information out, but will it send unintentional messages to the public, such as that FDA endorses WebMD, or that WebMD is a government-run site? The MOU outlines provisions to distinguish FDA’s information, but how will it be interpreted by WebMD’s millions of users?