International human-rights standards can help point a useful direction while we prepare ourseleves to face a new public-health challenge that has come to the fore in the fight against AIDS.
From the New England Journal of Medicine. "Currently, after a drug is approved for marketing, we rely on a voluntary reporting system based on the assumption that a drug is safe... It is remarkable that at a time when the technology for collecting and analyzing large amounts of data is readily available, an independent, comprehensive, and systematic program of post-marketing drug surveillance does not exist."