Word: fda
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is also struggling to keep up. Shipments of FDA-regulated goods from China have jumped fourfold over the past decade, according to the Congressional Research Service. But the FDA has only 1,317 field investigators for 320 ports of entry. The agency inspects just 0.7% of all imports under its purview, half of what it did 10 years ago. We've dropped our guard...
Sure, it would be great if the FDA could stamp every import with its seal of approval the way the Department of Agriculture does: meat, poultry and eggs can't be imported without meeting its standards. But David Acheson, who was appointed the FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection after the recall of tainted pet food in March, says that kind of monitoring for 16 million shipments of everything from cough syrup to toothpaste would be "too complex and cumbersome...
...instead the FDA saves its fire for the high-risk goods that have caused health problems. That's what happened in early June with Chinese-made toothpaste. Following 100 deaths in Panama linked to cough syrup containing diethylene glycol (the ingredient had been mislabeled as glycerin, which is harmless), the FDA issued an import alert on all toothpaste made in China, tested the tubes it could find for the toxin and recalled the questionable batches. "Obviously it's not possible for us to test every product that is coming in to make sure it's meeting every standard we have...
That's an efficient use of resources, but it makes the FDA a "tombstone" agency: nothing happens unless someone dies. "Consumers are the canary in the coal mine for this system," says Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "That's not what a government program should do. It should anticipate and prevent problems...
...salesmen were stock characters of the western frontier. They became notorious for their dangerous, counterfeit cure-alls, and there were no laws to stop them. By 1906, Americans had had enough bad medicine, and Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the creation of the FDA...