Word: fda
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...poorest." This tragedy, according to the Hesses, is as much the result of myths which Americans have been led to believe as it is the consequence of modern methods of mass food production. The high priests of gourmandise and nutrition--home economists, restaurant critics, cookbook writers, food historians, FDA officials--have all contributed to the mythology which has made us a nation of poor taste. These so-called experts on what we should eat and how we should eat it operate on the basis of deficiencies which "laymen" do not realize: conflicting interests, poor or irrelevant training, snobbery regarding what...
Value Judgments. Ever since, the FDA has preferred to err on the safe side. In the past few years it has restricted the use of hexachlorophene as a disinfectant and banned chloroform for use in cough medicines and sequential-type (imitative of natural hormone cycles) birth control pills. In 1976 the agency took off the market Red Dye No. 2, the most widely used coloring in food and cosmetics. FDA officials conceded that there was no proof that the dye was unsafe but contended that manufacturers could not prove it was safe-even though the substance had been used...
Consumerist Appeal. One reason is the burgeoning scope of the FDA'S activities. The agency's budget has ballooned from $5 million in 1955 to $279 million this year. Its 7,000 employees, half of them scattered through 17 locations around Washington, are charged with regulating a staggering $200 billion worth of goods yearly. Its powers have grown steadily ever since the agency was founded in 1907 under crusading Pure-Food Advocate Harvey Wiley, chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture. In 1938, after 107 people died from use of a sulfanilamide preparation that was supposed...
...FDA's power expanded even further because of the Delaney clause and the lobbying efforts of the late Senator Estes Kefauver. The Senator, an early appreciator of the political appeal of consumerism, pushed through legislation allowing the FDA to ban drugs unless they could be proved effective as well as safe. Thus the agency became involved in preventing possible products from reaching the market, as well as demanding the withdrawal of hazardous ones. Since 1962 the FDA has kept more than 6,500 prescription drugs off the market because their effectiveness could not be demonstrated. The number of over...
Boosters can sum up the agency's merits in one word: thalidomide. In 1961-62, the stubborn skepticism of FDA Pharmacologist Dr. Frances Kelsey kept that tranquilizer from sale in the U.S.-though it was marketed in Europe and Canada, where its use by pregnant women led to the birth of many deformed babies. Critics, however, can cite another name from the same period: MER29. The FDA approved that anticholesterol drug for use, then rescinded the decision when some people who took it developed cataracts...