Social Networks and Recall News Propagation

Image by adamr.stone via Flickr

Technology Thursday

The big news coming in over the mom transom this past week was the massive recall of children's medicine: Tylenol, Motrin, Zyrtec, Benadryl. The reasons given for it have been vague - and last I heard apparently there have been no adverse medical effects (that we know of). Nonetheless, we have all been advised to discard the medicine and use generics instead until the manufacturers get their process cleaned up and straightened out.

Once I got past the irritation about poor quality control and a comparatively toothless Food and Drug Administration, I was interested to watch how the information about the recall flowed through my social network (both in-person and virtual networks, I mean.)

I think I first saw mention of it pop on on a local parenting list. It was mentioned by one or two people I follow on Twitter. It probably wasn't until the 4th or 5th mention, though, where it finally sunk in to the point that I figured I should click one of the links and see what all the fuss was about. I find that's often true when I'm in scanning mode on social media, by the way. For news to really penetrate, beyond the most superficial headlines, such as "Something's going on with Tylenol again" or "Another anti-gay wingnut caught soliciting gay prostitutes; ho-hum", I typically need to see it from several sources, or from a trusted source close to or in my personal network .

A day or so later someone posted something to the Ning network that my local moms group uses. And when I picked up my son at school the other day, his teachers had attached a printout of the list of recalled meds to his take-home sheet. So two things about this were interesting to me. First, I got the news from several different sources over the course of a few days. Second, while my online sources were faster, it was heartening to me that my local/"meatspace" sources were also reliable for this kind of thing.

I went around the house and dug up all the bottles I could find. We had stocked up during a bout of ear infections and teething, and then stocked up again in advance of a road trip a couple of months ago. And while I'm actually not a big fan of medicating my toddler much at all, I'm even less of a fan of dealing with a kid screaming from teething pain in the middle of the night without any pain meds. So I've made sure we're never running low. All of this meant I had many bottles of the recalled meds to dump. I filled out the online form and hopefully I'll see some sort of reimbursement soon. In the meantime, in advance of another trip, we're stocking up on generics.

People talk about information overload, but in cases like this I see all the channels through which the information about this recall managed to flow to me as a robust info-delivery system with appropriate levels of redundancy!

Comments

[Stacy]

I agree with you that it's helpful to have information like this come from a variety of sources, both online and offline. I was glad, though, that we've given up on name brands and gone to using generics. I was frustrated, though, that it took a while to figure out whether the recall affected any generics although I did check to see who manufactured the yummy, according to my kids, grape medicine and determined that it wasn't McNeil.

[Lyn]

We had not had the discussion about generics vs. name-brands re kids meds in our house yet - just hadn't floated to the top of the list of things to think about. We've been using generics since the recall, and the downside is that my son seems to find the generic purple tastier than the dye-free name-brand we'd been getting, so he now actively asks for his purple medicine. Le sigh. (Ear infection + 2-year molars mean he's been getting it somewhat frequently.)