Power cuts are common in Pakistan, but a nationwide failure is rare.

BBC: Pakistan orders inquiry into nationwide power cut

For Rivera, it was a rare moment of failure.

WSJ: Rivera thanks Indians employees for memories

But Vioxx caused an increased risk of congestive heart failure, and Bextra led to rare skin reactions.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Here, then, is a retrospective look at some of the scariest side effects to crop up over the past 12 months--from rare events like liver failure or brain-wasting diseases to more common ones such as heart attacks or strokes.

FORBES

Except in the rare cases of total market failure (like Darfur and North Korea), cash has huge advantages over food aid.

ECONOMIST: A new market environment

Both journalists and physicians, Wood notes, are more impressed by rare events, such as liver failure, that can be clearly associated with a drug.

FORBES

However, in the rare circumstances in which the impending or actual failure of an institution imposes substantial systemic risks, the standard procedures for resolving institutions may be inadequate.

FORBES: Reducing Systemic Risk

The approval comes amid a flurry of research showing broader promise for the approach in a range of disorders, from a rare form of blindness to hemophilia to heart failure.

WSJ: The Future of Medicine Is Now: Medical Innovations

But while there may be a need for remedial FCC action--in the relatively rare case when there may be a proven market failure--any such action should be targeted narrowly to redress demonstrable consumer harms.

FORBES

The discovery that both boys had a rare metabolic condition called Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome (SLOS), which results from a failure of the body to make its own cholesterol, explained many of their struggles during their early years.

BBC: 'No-one had heard of my boys' syndrome'