The Food and Drug Administration has chastised Pfizer for failing to include essential risk information about its drugs on its website. The agency's reprimand came after it received a tip about Pfizer's failure to include drug risk data.

Last year the FDA launched an initiative aimed at encouraging medical professionals, including physicians, nurses and pharmacists, to come forward with information about misleading advertisements placed by pharmaceutical companies. The action against Pfizer is the result of one such tip. The information that Pfizer allegedly concealed on its website involved the drug risks from a number of pharmaceutical products, including Chantix, the drug to prevent smoking, and Norvasc, a high blood pressure medication.

According to the FDA, the website contains links to pages dedicated to these drugs, but these pages contain no information about the drugs risks. Patients, who browse through the website looking for information on these drugs, would have no clue about the drug safety risks. For instance, Los Angeles pharmaceutical liability attorneys are aware of studies associating Chantix with an increased risk of suicide or suicidal tendencies. These risks are not mentioned on the website.

The FDA has been receiving a number of tips since the initiative began. Since May last year when it launched the initiative, the agency has received more than three times the average number of tips that it received earlier. In more than 80 of these cases, the agency was forced to take a closer look at the offending ad.