Word: penicillin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hastening to restore confidence in its imprimatur, the FDA last week launched a crash program to re-evaluate 30 of the most commonly prescribed generic medications, including such prevalent antibiotics as ampicillin and oral penicillin. Over the next six weeks, the agency will test more than 1,000 samples to make sure they are biologically equivalent to their brand-name counterparts. In addition, the FDA, which had cut back its commercial inspections because of budget restraints, announced that it will hire more field inspectors and seek tougher punishments for unscrupulous manufacturers...
Antibiotics like penicillin and tetracycline are mixed into animal feed for similar reasons. The low doses enhance growth and ward off ailments such as influenza and intestinal diseases, which are caused by the overcrowding and confinement common to factory farming. About half of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. today are fed to farm animals...
Grief and bewilderment etched the weary, unshaven faces of the airport volunteers, whose bloodshot eyes seemed to brim with tears. Workers formed a human chain in the pouring rain to unload the plane's cargo of pain-killers, penicillin, iodine swabs and bandages donated by American companies. They worked by flashlight well into the night. A young man took me aside and whispered, "Be sure to tell everyone in America and Europe how thankful...
...animal experiments to determine the course of human medicine is unreliable. Penicillin is toxic to guinea pigs, while aspirin is poisonous to cats. If these substances had been tested on animals, they may never have made it to market...
...time, in contrast to human specialists, who were right in 42.5% to 62.5% of cases. Still, Mycin did not have a clue that it was diagnosing a human being, nor did it have any idea what a human is. In fact, it was perfectly capable of trying to prescribe penicillin to fix a broken window. All it could do was rigidly test the applicability of various rules to pieces of data. This led critics like Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at M.I.T., to dismiss expert systems like Mycin as "Potemkin villages. You move a little to the left...