Word: fda
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Although the report gives some grudging credit to HEW Secretary Robert Finch for his banning of cyclamates, it takes the position that the additive should never have been permitted in the first place, and notes that studies of its potentially harmful effects had been available to the FDA for nearly 20 years. As an example of the FDA's cozy relationship with the food industry, the report cites an agency order that allowed soft-drink bottlers to exclude the listing of caffeine from the number of ingredients that had been added to their beverages...
Long-winded as well as angry in tone, the report occasionally strikes out with rhetorical inaccuracy-as when it seems to put most of the blame on the FDA for the fact that the American infant-mortality rate, once fifth lowest in the world, is now 13th lowest. But many of its points are soundly made. While placing a large share of the blame on practices of the food industry, Nader's Raiders hit hard at the FDA for frittering away its limited resources on relatively harmless quacks while letting major corporations go virtually unregulated. They note that...
Well aware of the report's general contents for several weeks, the FDA made a swift response. Just two days after its release, the agency announced plans to revoke thousands of food additives previously declared safe under its old sanctioning procedures...
...often as those receiving other drugs. But lithium carbonate posed a problem for the drug industry. A common chemical, it could not be patented, so there could be little profit in its manufacture. Any schoolboy could buy it from a chemical supply house for his basement laboratory; the FDA insisted that only research psychiatrists could use it clinically, under rigid rules...
...FDA was promptly attacked by the American Medical Association, which charged it with interfering in doctor-patient relationships, and by the pharmaceutical companies, which saw their sales slipping. White House pressure made the FDA back down...