In response to US claims concerning the potential risks to human health of the diabetes drug Avandia, the European Commission recently ordered the European Agency for Evaluation of Medicinal Products (EMEA) to review the dangerousness of the medicine and to “report by October on the dangerousness of diabetes medicines containing rosiglitazone, namely Avandia, Avandamet and Avaglim”. It also announced that “the last time the EU renewed the authorisation for Avandia, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), we were not aware of the recently published studies”. At the end of June, two new American studies were published. They state that Avandia increases the risk of heart failure and stroke compared to Actos, a treatment in the same category manufactured by the Japanese firm Takeda. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to decide in the coming hours whether or not to pull this treatment off the market.