Why you will not find brand names in the statistics

In the adverse event files that FDA publishes through openFDA, the brand name and the manufacturer of every drug are replaced with the letters "MSK": masked. That is FDA's decision about what to disclose, and this site does not work around it. No count, reported sign, trend or page here is attributed to a brand, a trade name, an FDA application number or a company.

What the records do disclose

Each drug in a report keeps its active ingredients, its route and its dosage form. So the site counts by active ingredient:

• A drug page covers one set of active ingredients as recorded for a drug: a single ingredient such as afoxolaner, or a combination such as imidacloprid + moxidectin. It gathers every report in which a drug with that set appears, whatever its brand. There are 366 of them.
• A pooled ingredient page counts one ingredient alone and in all its combinations, where that gives a different picture from a single drug page.

Only ingredients of FDA-approved animal drugs (the Green Book list) and a short fixed list of generic human-label substances are recognised. Reporters sometimes type brand names into the ingredient field; those entries are ignored.

Where brand names do appear

• In a separate reference section on each page, "FDA-approved products (Green Book)", which lists the trade names, sponsors and approved species of products with that ingredient. It carries no counts, because nothing in the public data says which product a report concerned.
• In the search box. Typing a trade name shows "Trade name → ingredient" and takes you to the ingredient's page.

What this means when you read a page

• A figure for an ingredient covers every product that contains it: pioneer and generic, every strength and form, chewable and injectable, and in some cases human-label or compounded versions.
• Two products with the same ingredient can differ in formulation, amount, species and how they are used. The public data cannot separate them, and FDA states that these data cannot be used to compare one product with another in any case.
• The ingredient field is filled in by whoever submitted the report and can be incomplete: a three-ingredient product is sometimes recorded with two. Reports about one product can therefore sit under more than one ingredient set.

For questions about a specific product, the FDA-approved label and a veterinarian are the right sources. To report a problem with a specific product, see how to report; the report you file does name the product, and FDA's reviewers see it in full.