Posted on 02/03/2009 9:33:27 AM PST by hadit2here
Do you know why the FDA is in charge of keeping America's food supply safe?
Because no other nation would have them.
That's the thought I'm left with after learning… and this was no big surprise… that the FDA played a larger role than we thought in allowing a salmonella outbreak to sweep through the nation, sickening hundreds and possibly killing 8 people.
I told you a couple weeks ago there would be more to this story.
By now you know that the salmonella outbreak has been tied to Peanut Corp.'s peanut processing facility in Georgia. I was surprised that our normally-bungling FDA was able to identify the source so quickly. Now I know why.
It turns out that the FDA knew for nine months that there were unsanitary practices going on at this facility. Nine months!
You see, Peanut Corp. tried to ship some peanuts into Canada back in April 2008. The shipment was rejected for having a "filthy, putrid or decomposed substance," and ended up in the FDA's possession.
They never tested it. After some back and forth with Peanut Corp., the FDA decided it had some serious concerns about the adequacy of the company's testing practices. It destroyed the shipment… and that was it.
No follow up. No testing of the rejected food. No asking Peanut Corp. to stop selling products until it got conditions at its plant back under control.
The FDA did what it does best. It got out of the way. It let a company that wasn't producing food suitable for Canadians keep selling to Americans.
And the story isn't over. It seems like every day the number of sick increases, and a new batch of products is recalled. Meanwhile, the FDA wants us to believe they're on top of the problem.
They're more than on top of the problem – they're party to blame for it.
As I've been telling you for years, don't count on food conglomerates or the FDA to look out for your health and safety. Buy locally and grow your own food when you can. Folks who do those two things always seem to come out of these public health messes just fine.
The FDA would be a complete farce and a laughable joke if it didn't have life or death control over U.S. citizen's health and businesses. While they will storm, with full body armor and automatic weapons, a medical doctor's office who treats his patients - successfully - with large doses of vitamins, they actually promote Big Pharma's products that kill millions each year.
And with Odumbo, you'll see their power expanded even more over your health and food.
FDA should stand for Fu@#ing Dumb Asses!
We are suffocating under smothering regulations but receiving none of the promised benefits.
Wasn’t W blaimed for salmonila chicken or eggs a few years back?
I blame Obama for this. He hates peanut eating AMericans!
I’m looking forward to a nice comfortable government job...
It sounds like someone screwed up big time dealing with the peanuts, but since you moved on from the peanuts story to a rant about the “jackbooted thug enforcement arm of the Pharmaceutical industry”...
I always laugh at these descriptions of the FDA. They’re “jackbooted thugs” because SOMETIMES they tell some left-wing kooks peddling quackery and snake oil that their snake oil kills people.
Then the “evil” drug companies spend billions of dollars on research and development to find the real medicines. They spend billions more to purify out the useless and potentially harmless biproducts. Now, the “supplement” has become a “pharmaceutical.” So they have to spend billions more to test the efficiacy, and safety of their product. Now, those same jack- booted thugs are corrupt shills when they let a tested, quality-controlled, proven-effective product move to market.
>> He hates peanut eating AMericans! <<
George Washington Carver is spinning in his grave. *chuckle*
I doubt the MSM will hold Obama accountable for anything let alone this incident.
Did Haliburton ever grow peanuts? There could be a Bush/Cheney peanut conspiracy!
You left out the trial lawyers...the real jack-booted thugs that strip billions from Health Care and Pharmaceutical every year either in settlements or outrageous insurance premiums resulting from excessive litigation.
No but Jimmy Carter did.
Yes, that’s another irony:
Makers of purified pharmaceuticals are 100% liable for any failure to dream up the perfect scenario of possible misuse, and to make sure that under such misuse (and any accompanying overdosage), the drug remains perfectly safe, or else they get sued for billions.
However, if you never test your product’s safety at all, and you never purify it, it remains a “supplement” and you can make false claims about a deadly product and scarcely ever need to worry about lawsuits.
Thirty years ago there was the APHIS and USDA was responsible for the food inspection and control. Somewhere between Jimmy Carter’s reign and then during the Clinton administration, the power of the smaller inspection services was reduced and the FDA given the overall responsibility to ensure our food sources were safe. I remember during the Clinton administration the Food Inspection services were put under the control of a lawyer instead of a health professional familiar with food safety.
I got a recall letter today from a wholesale food outlet from whom I bught five pounds of tainted peanuts.
that would be bought, not bught.
After testing a new drug in clinical trials among hundreds or thousands of people, and then gaining FDA approval, the drug moves to the full market where millions of people have access to it. Some people think that adding millions of customers for a product as complex as a pharmaceutical should produce the same results as found in the clinical trials. These are also the same people who think all risk can be removed from our lives with enough regulation and oversight. They don't understand much about science or research.
Bringing a NME to market, from discovery to approval, can take more than 12 years and can cost up to $800 million. IIRC, only about 1 in 4,000 drugs proposed in preclinical testing actually ever makes it to market. Anyone who thinks the relationship between industry and the FDA is anything but adversarial has no idea what they're talking about.
If FDA had taken private property without just compensation we would be (rightly) complaining. Certainly there is no way the Agency can inspect every one of the hundreds of thousands facilities within their jurisdiction. What happened is regrettable but understandable given the sweeping scope of the FDA’s mission and their limited resources. Should they have inspected the PCA facility? Probably. However, hindsight is 20/20.
Well, if they don't approve drugs fast enough, they are blamed for holding up medical advances; when they DO approve drugs after they've been tested in 4,000 or so patients (or even 2,000) and then after they are on the market 1 in 40,000 has a bad reaction, they are blamed! Sorry, but they cannot win...
I agree that they can’t win. I used to say that they’re a 10-billion dollar outfit policing a trillion-dollar set of (as you noted) unrelated industries — from peanut butter to antidepressants to tongue depressors to erythropoietin to artificial hearts to cell phones. Who (in their right mind) can pull that off?
But what’s really amazing is that these same quacks will imediately the source herb of said drug with no demonstrated efficacy, no safety tests, no purification, and if the government notices that people are dying from the nonsense, they’re “jack-booted thugs.”
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