U.S. To Target Fraudulent Health Sites

The FTC said that on Thursday it will announce a new round of law enforcement actions to stem the tide of fraudulent marketing of supplements and other health products on the Internet. It will also offer new online tools for consumers to help them avoid being victims of online health-care fraud.

"If these companies are out there promoting cures for non-lethal diseases or for obesity, that's one thing, but if they're promoting cures for cancer and AIDS, that's really a more serious problem, and the commission takes that very seriously," FTC spokesman Mitch Katz told industry press.

Operation Cure All

The new efforts are part of an ongoing federal and state law enforcement and consumer education campaign called "Operation Cure All," launched by the FTC in 1999. The goal of the campaign was to target bogus health claims on the Internet.

According to a Harris Interactive Poll taken last year, the number of Americans looking to the Internet for health-care information doubled to 98 million from 1998 to 2000. The sheer number of health sites make policing and regulation difficult, particularly with regard to online pharmacies, law enforcement officials have said.

Illegal AIDS Tests

Health experts say many health-care Web sites are unscrupulous, citing the examples of illegal and ineffective AIDS tests that might have led some people to think they were not infected when in fact they were.

In addition, because a consumer generally searches for a specific health topic, e.g., "cancer cure," techniques that direct a consumer to a particular Web site can contribute to the consumer's belief that the products offered on the identified site are effective for that purpose.

According to the FTC, cancer-related searches are the most common health-care search, followed by heart disease.

False Positives

Since the beginning of "Operation Cure All", the FTC has settled cases with a wide variety of online health sites. In the majority of cases, the FTC alleged that the sites touted their products as being effective treatments or cures for various diseases, including arthritis, cancer, diabetes and AIDS, without adequate substantiation to support the claims.

In addition, FTC complaints have challenged the use of various types of sophisticated Internet techniques, such as metatags, hyperlinks and mouseovers, to deceive consumers about the efficacy of a company's products.

In one case, the accused party allegedly used "mouseover text" in a deceptive manner, according to the FTC. Generally, when a surfer rolls the mouse over an image such as a flower, a small text window pops up briefly on the screen.

Instead of using that text to describe the image that appears on the screen (e.g. "flower image.gif"), the FTC alleged that the party in this case used the text window to make additional express efficacy claims about the product, such as: "Cures cancer, leukemia, lymphoma. Cures lupus, breast, prostate cancer."