话说ＦＤＡ

liver411

FDA是制药业最热衷于攻击的对象。制药公司及 其在媒体和议会里的助手无情地斥责该机构在将“救命”的药物推向市场的环节上设置官僚障碍。特别是《华尔街杂志》(The Wall Street Journal)和华盛顿法律基金会（Washington Legal Foundation）不断地对该机构进行攻击。如果你读了它们的文章，你会觉得FDA中充斥着反复无常的官僚们，他们总是想方设法地阻止美国人民得到那 些十分重要的药物——而他们这么做的动机到底是什么，这些文章并没有说明白。例如，《华尔街杂志》在一篇文章中这样敦促FDA去“改革它缓慢而又主观狭隘 的的方法，来正确处理那些能够救人一命的药物”，“不要把自己当作是看门狗，而应当是一个助手。”华盛顿法律基金会在《纽约时报》上的广告中警告说，“延 期做出万无一失的批准需要人类付出成本。刚性的程序要求、没完没了的数据以及追求毫无风险的产品，这些都使得新的治疗方法被卡在了FDA这个环节，与此同 时正有无数的患者在痛苦的等待中煎熬，甚至死去。”

    听起来十分可悲，但这不是事实。一种备选药物，从临床前测试到最终推向市场， 整个过程可能要花费六到十年的时间。其中等待FDA批准的时间并不长——2002年大概是16个月，并且还在缩短。事实上，由于制药业的压力，在过去十年 间，该机构从原来在发达国家中运转速度最慢的药物监管机构变成了最快的机构。在一些个案中，批准的时限甚至缩短到了几周时间。制药公司当然是想把包括测试 和审批之类所有的事情都省了，因为这些时间占了药物的专利期。

    但是，除了这些自由论的极端分子和《华尔街杂志》之外，还有谁希望 那种情况发生呢？我们之中有谁相信自由的市场能够确定药物和医疗器械是否安全和有效？你真的希望你的医生只听信制药公司的话，就认为给你的肺炎开的抗生素 药是管用的吗？医生并不是巫师，除非有像FDA这样的中立机构对药物的科学数据进行了分析，此外他们无从知道一种药物是否管用。仅仅根据个别患者的反应就 下结论，是臭名昭著的不可靠方法，而且也十分危险。为了确保结论正确，医生可能会勤勉地阅读医药杂志和教科书，但是事实上他们并没有太多的时间来这样做。 此外，如果没有FDA强制性地要求公司进行临床实验，在医药杂志上发表的此类文章可能会少之又少。

    开发创新药物并且将其推向市 场，是一个非常漫长而艰难的过程，并且没有捷径可寻。证明新药安全、有效是一个十分关键的环节，做出这个判断的应当是一个对公众健康负责的公正机构，而不 是对股东的股票价值负责的制药公司。1906年时的情况正好相反，制药公司宣称他们出售的任何一种药物都具有神奇疗效，那时的口号就是“购者自慎” （caveat emptor，意味着“购买者本身自应多加小心”）。鉴于现在“me-too”药（“me-too”药沿用了创新药物的研发思路、作用机理和作用靶点，却 在化学结构上进行了一定的创新，规避了专利侵权）占据了制药行业的大半个江山，所以说让制药公司急着开发下一种全新的创新药物，实在是一件勉为其难的事。

liver411

FDA Consumer
June 1981

The Long Struggle For The 1906 Law

The Dining Room of "The Poison Squad"

Many forces combined to create the need for the 1906 Food and Drugs Act. James Harvey Young traces the history of the law and the conditions that led to its enactment. The author is professor of history at Emory University and is the author of many books and articles on food and drug regulatory history.

By James Harvey Young

One June 30, 1906, a broiling day in Washington, President Theodore Roosevelt went to the Capitol to sign into law nearly a hundred bills hurried through the Congress as its session came to an end. Among them was one passed the day before by both Senate and House in a form agreed to in conference committee, the Food and Drugs Act. Although a latecomer to the cause of a pure food law, Teddy Roosevelt had used his weight decisively in 1906 to ensure that this time Congress would not adjourn, as so often before, leaving such legislation languishing.

The 1906 law's relevant background in America starts with colonial food statutes concerned with bread and meat. The first national law came in 1848 during the Mexican War. It banned the importation of adulterated drugs, a chronic public health problem that finally got Congressional attention.

The first prolonged and impassioned controversy in the Congress involving a pure food issue took place in 1886, pitting the reigning champion, butter, against a challenger, oleomargarine. Butter won, and oleomargarine was taxed and placed under other restraints that persisted on the Federal level until 1950. The debate in 1886 between the defenders of a natural food and those of its alleged artificial substitute centered not only on matters of vested interest, but also pondered concerns about the public health, issues of governmental authority, and the myths in which were enshrined the meaning of the American experience. Such themes re-echoed in Congressional chambers as Senate and House later debated broader bills to control food and drugs in interstate commerce. The first broad bill had been introduced in 1879, although a decade passed before Congress displayed serious interest.

One way to structure the intricate pure food story is to consider seven "C's." These are change, complexity, competition, crusading, coalescence, compromise, and catastrophe.

Change means the turbulent readjustments in the American way of life that occurred as society industrialized and urbanized. Accompanying, indeed fostering, such modifications came a revolution in science and technology, with its planned and also unforeseen consequences. Discoveries in chemistry, for example, led to new synthetic medicines and altered radically both the growing and the processing of food. Transportation developments brought processed food to an increasingly national market, making the growth of giant cities possible. The residents of those cities lost the ability villagers had possessed of being first-hand judges of the food they ate.

Some of the food that city dwellers took from cans and jars deviated greatly from village garden produce. Chemicals could be used to heighten color, modify flavor, soften texture, deter spoilage, and even transform ingredients like apple scraps, glucose, coal-tar dye, and timothy seeds into concoction labeled strawberry jam. Adulteration might be an age-old problem, but, in the words of a Senate report in 1890, "it has only been since the great opportunity for fraud provided by modern science ... that the sophistication of articles of commerce has reached its present height."

The second "C" stands for complexity. All of man's concerns grow more complex, and a particular kind of complexity became wedded to the question of how the Federal Government might confront deceptions and hazards in the food and drug supply. A few products, like oleomargarine and tea, were controlled by individual laws. Mainstream legislation proposed in the Congress, however, was complex, omnibus bills encompassing food and drink and drugs. All food and drink and most drugs entered the body through the mouth, and all were subject to similar adulterations. So it was natural to face the problem all at once. British precedent pointed in this direction, a factor of consequence in the campaign for an American law. Not only did drafters of both State and Federal bills turn for guidance to British experience; American businessmen and farmers engaged in exporting food frequently felt the bite of, and hence became keenly aware of, British law. Broad omnibus bills meant that many interest groups would be subject to the law's provisions, with producing and processing units located in every congressional district. Such a circumstance made inevitable a long and tortuous legislative process.

Competition in the marketplace, the third "C," lay behind the earliest omnibus bills. By a sort of Gresham's law, adulterated foods that could be sold more cheaply threatened to drive out sounder fare. Alarmed, the more reputable wing of the food industry appealed to the Congress for help and gave counsel to that body. In 1879, a trade press editor persuaded his brother-in-law, a wholesale grocer, to put up a prize for the best draft statute submitted to the National Board of Trade. The prize was won by an English food analyst who adapted the 1875 British law to American circumstances. The Board of Trade prize committee revamped the analyst's proposal, and in 1881 a Connecticut congressman introduced the committee draft as a bill.

Throughout the succeeding quarter of a century, the pain of what they deemed unfair competition kept business groups reviving their appeals to the Congress for the protection that would be afforded by a national law. As the 1890 Senate Report put it, faith in commercial integrity, the "very foundation of trade," was being undermined. The proliferation of State laws containing contradictory provisions made action on the national level the only sensible solution. "As it is now," a maker of jam complained, "we have to manufacture differently for each state." A national statute might set a standard States would follow.

Farmers in agrarian States, as their campaign against oleomargarine demonstrated, also felt aggrieved by what they thought was unfair competition. Shady processors adulterated fertilizers, deodorized rotten eggs, revived rancid butter, substituted glucose for honey. Farmers began to learn about such deceptions from a new breed of agriculture chemists, often trained in Germany, located in State officialdom and helped by Federal funds. These chemists could apply their scientific skills to expose the work of chemists employed by industry to depreciate food products, as the Senate Report put it, in "a greed for gain." Exposure bulletins agitated farmers, who increased their demand for a protective national law.

Those threatened by the new competition could bring omnibus bills before the Congress but could not secure their passage. At the height of the Populist movement in 1892, agrarian pressure got one bill through the Senate, but divided business interests and constitutional scruples blocked it in the House. During the remaining years of the 19th century, no broad pure food bill made it through either chamber of Congress. Competitors spoke with conflicting voices, all heard in Washington. The broad public was not yet very much aroused.

When the first omnibus bills began to appear, George T. Angell represented the prime example of crusading, the fourth "C." A lawyer whose claim to public recognition lay in his fight against cruelty to animals, Angell advocated rigorous regulation of all food processors, charging that dire hazards to health plagued every marketplace. Angell thought business-sponsored bills were too unmindful of the consumer, whereas businessmen thought Angell a devilish alarmist. Later, such committed champions of the consumer as the National Consumer League and the General Federation of Women's Clubs joined the crusade for a tough law, and so, too, with the new century, did muckraking journalists.

Harvey W. Wiley came to be the leader of the "pure food crusade." A chemist and physician, State chemist of Indiana and professor at Purdue University, Wiley went to Washington in 1883 as chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture. He made the study of food adulteration his bureau's principal business, at first merely outraged by what he deemed essentially harmless fraud. In time, sensing real threats to health, Wiley could express himself in writing, conversation, and oratory with vividness, clarity, homely wit, and moral passion. He toured the country making speeches, every rostrum a pulpit for the gospel of pure food.

Besides crusading for a law, Wiley played other indispensable roles. He sought to organize his allies and recruits into a coalition which might be powerful enough to move Congress to action. Coalescence is the fifth "C." Wiley forged bonds among agricultural chemists, State food and drug officials, women's club members, the medical profession, sympathetic journalists, the reform wing of business, and favorably disposed members of Congress. This was a mighty effort requiring the utmost in patience and diplomacy.

Could all factions favoring a law in principle, especially elements from the complex business community, be brought to agreement in support of a specific bill? Compromise, the sixth "C," seemed to offer a route to success. In three National Pure Food and Drug Congresses held between 1898 and 1900, Wiley sought to work out agreements in the private sector that might smooth passage of a law. The magnitude of the task is suggested by a look at some of the groups represented: trade associations, for example, of millers and brewers, marketers of butter and makers of candy, fishermen and beekeepers, wholesale and retail grocers, wholesale druggists, and proprietary medicine manufacturers. Also present were representatives from State and Federal agencies, farm organizations, professional societies of chemists and pharmacists, even the National Peace Conference and the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Delegates labored diligently and made much progress, but not enough. Some differences seemed too wide to bridge, like those between dairy and margarine interests, between makers of alum and cream-of-tartar baking powders, and between straight whiskey distillers and blenders. As the new century dawned, efforts at compromise continued, but in the halls and committee rooms of Congress.

In some ways the constantly revised version of the battered basic bill became more rigorous because crusading accelerated. Increasing criticism by the revitalized American Medical Association and by journalists of patent medicine abuses, for example, brought controls aimed at nostrums into the bill -- at the cost of drug trade support. And Dr. Wiley's sober scientific effort, begun in 1902, to test his hypothesis that chemical preservatives in processed foods posed threats to health, reported flamboyantly in the press as "Poison Squad" experiments, made a growing audience aware of adulteration and of the pending bill.

At the turn of the century, false hopes were sold with vigor similar to today. This cartoon from the April 29, 1909, Life magazine illustrates the point.

Twice an omnibus bill passed the House of Representatives under the aegis of its managers, Congressmen from western States in which agricultural interests were dominant. But business lobbies, especially whiskey rectifiers and proprietary drug manufacturers, despite all the power of Wiley's coalition, kept the pure food bill from becoming law. The opposition was more silent than outspoken, making its weight felt through parliamentary obstructionism. Southern conservatives did openly challenge the constitutionality of such legislation. "The Federal Government," opined a Georgia congressman, "was not created for the purpose of cutting your toe nails or corns."

In the end it took the seventh "C," catastrophe, to fuel the final compromise and get the law enacted. The catastrophe concerned meat. Meat had been separated from other food for special legislative treatment in 1890 and 1891. Federal inspection had been started not to safeguard the American diet but to reassure European nations that had banned importation of American pork on the exaggerated charge that it had caused epidemics of trichinosis. A newspaper scare closer to home arose during the Spanish-American War, when packers were blamed with shipping "embalmed beef " that sickened the troops. Investigation traced some of the trouble to the rapid growth of bacteria in meat exposed to the hot Cuban sun.

Then, in 1906, Upton Sinclair published his socialist novel, THE JUNGLE, aimed, as he later said, at people's hearts but hitting their stomachs instead. His few pages describing filthy conditions in Chicago's packing plants, widely reported and confirmed by governmental inquiry, cut meat sales in half, angered President Roosevelt, and pushed a meat inspection bill aimed at protecting the domestic market through the Congress.

The President, in December 1905, had at long last sent a terse message to the Congress urging it to enact a pure food bill. The Senate had responded. Amidst the meat crisis, when the House leadership seemed again determined to give the food measure the silent treatment, Roosevelt called the speaker in and insisted that the bill be brought to the floor. Wiley energized his coalition to a last burst of pressure. Committees engaged in a final flurry of compromise. And the bill became law.

The 1906 law forbade interstate and foreign commerce in adulterated and misbranded food and drugs. Offending products could be seized and condemned; offending persons could be fined and jailed. Drugs had either to abide by standards of purity and quality set forth in the UNITED STATES PHARMACOPEIA and the NATIONAL FORMULARY, works prepared by committees of physicians and pharmacists, or meet individual standards chosen by their manufacturers and stated on their labels. An effort failed to place in the law food standards as defined by the agricultural chemists, but the law prohibited the adulteration of food by the removal of valuable constituents, the substitution of ingredients so as to reduce quality, the addition of deleterious ingredients, and the use of spoiled animal and vegetable products. Making false or misleading label statements regarding a food or a drug constituted misbranding. The presence and quantity of alcohol or certain narcotic drugs had to be stated on proprietary labels.

The law sought to protect the consumer from being deceived or harmed, mainly by following a favorite assumption that the average man was prudent enough to plot his own course and would avoid risks if labeling made him aware of them. In this spirit, some ardent pure food advocates predicted that the law would usher in the millennium. Defeated business interests, on the other hand, congratulated themselves that the bill's strictures, largely through their own lobbying, had not turned out to be tougher than they were. Anxiously these interests waited to observe the temper of enforcement. Dr. Wiley believed that, for a pioneering statute, the measure had turned out rather well. He felt optimistic that Congress would readily remedy weaknesses in the law which he immediately recognized and which he knew would be further revealed by enforcement efforts. Although some fuzziness existed in the administrative provisions, the law gave Wiley's Bureau of Chemistry the task of spotting violations and preparing cases for the courts. Both a crusader and compromiser in the long struggle to secure the law, Wiley determined, now that Congress had put power into his hands, to wear his crusading armor and enforce the measure to the hilt. The new battles, he would quickly learn, would be the most rugged he had ever fought.

Inspectors from the Bureau of Chemistry's office in Indianapolis, 1909.

A Bureau of Chemistry laboratory, 1911.

---

See also The Story of the Laws Behind the Labels.

liver411

July 8, 2007

The World

Can China Reform Itself?

By JOSEPH KAHN
BEIJING

PHONY fertilizer destroys crops. Stores shelves are filled with deodorized rotten eggs, and chemical glucose is passed off as honey. Exports slump when European regulators find dangerous bacteria in packaged meat.

More product safety scandals in China? Not this time. These quality problems prompted a sluggish United States  overnment to tighten food and drug regulation 101 years ago, when President Theodore Roosevelt signed the act that created the Food and Drug Administration.

Like America’s industrializing economy a century ago, China’s is powered by zealous entrepreneurs who sometimes act like pirates. Both countries suffered epidemics of fatal fakes, and both have had regulators who were too inept, corrupt or hamstrung to do much about it.

The question now is whether Chinese factories, caught exporting poisonous pharmaceutical ingredients, filthy shellfish, bogus pet food and faulty tires, can react in time to head off more damage to their reputation.

Or, to put it another way, are the latest incidents enough to push China toward its own Progressive Era?  The answer, say people who have studied the country’s regulatory system, is a cautious yes. But first, they say, Beijing must take a fresh approach to inspecting and policing its often unruly economy.

Chinese exporters sold nearly $1 trillion worth of goods overseas last year. Fakes and shoddy goods, by most measures, made up no more than a tiny fraction of that total. Yet the string of product safety scandals reflects a persistent roguish undercurrent in the Chinese economy that extensive media coverage, new laws and tougher enforcement have not eliminated.

Teddy Roosevelt’s government had to overcome ideological opposition to regulating private-sector commerce.  China has a different political challenge: Its authoritarian government, though under the control of one party, has struggled to develop a modern, unified regulatory system that can supervise a dynamic market economy.

“Competition inside our bureaucracy has led to a diffusion of power and a tendency to shirk responsibility,” says Mao Shoulong, a public policy expert at People’s University in Beijing. “Cracking down on individual criminals doesn’t solve the problem. We need to fix the whole system.”

Safety lapses are a serious side effect of China’s gradual and still incomplete efforts to separate politics and business. To spur economic growth in the 1980s, top leaders gave local-level officials more power. The goal was to undercut socialist conservatives in the central government who exercised tight controls. Regulatory power was also scattered.

Growth surged. Entrepreneurs, foreign investors and peasant farmers assumed a dominant role in production. But safety, as well as labor and environmental standards, fell by the wayside.

Scores of people died after ingesting bathtub baijiu, or rice wine, that substituted cheap industrial-grade alcohol for the real stuff. Condiments used as spices for hot-pot cooking contained paraffin wax. Vermicelli noodles carried a cancer-causing agent, as did a popular red dye, called Sudan Red, that was used by Kentucky Fried Chicken and Heinz, among other companies.

Hundreds of parents in Liaoning Province were so frustrated by the local government’s response to a spate of food poisonings at a school cafeteria in 2003 that they blockaded the local railroad.

Perhaps the most sensational case occurred in 2004, when small factories in central China produced cheap infant milk formula that lacked protein. Some 50 infants in Anhui Province died from malnutrition after their parents and some doctors mistook their symptoms — bloated faces and hands — as a sign of overfeeding.

Since then, regulatory efforts have been strengthened, but often with limited results. As many as 17 bureaucracies have overlapping responsibilities in just the food and drug sphere, and they jealously guard their power. The Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Agriculture, the State Administration of Industry and Commerce, and the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine have all vied for monitoring roles.

The reason: They wanted to collect license fees and fines to supplement their measly budgets. No less significantly, inspectors and their bosses could collect bribes in exchange for favors.

“It came down to turf warfare between departments,” said Roger Skinner, a retired British regulator who advised the Chinese government on improving food safety on behalf of the World Health Organization. “If they can’t enforce, they will lose revenue.”

Realizing they had created a muddle of competing bureaucracies, top leaders in 2003 formed the State Food and Drug Administration, named after its American counterpart, that on paper had “super-ministerial authority” to coordinate all the others that monitored the politically sensitive food and drug sphere.

The agency quickly fell victim to infighting, however, and lost clout in 2005, when its first director, Zheng Xiaoyu, was forced out. He was later convicted of taking bribes for speeding approval of new drugs. After the latest string of safety scandals erupted, Mr. Zheng was sentenced to death.

Blurred lines of responsibility and weak investigative powers partly explain why Chinese regulators gave little help to their American counterparts in the most fatal example of China’s safety problems reaching foreign shores.

In 1997 and again last year, the Americans sought information about why Chinese chemical companies had exported counterfeit glycerin, containing poisonous diethylene glycol, that ended up in medical products in Haiti and Panama. Scores of people who consumed the products in both countries died.

The diethylene glycol was made in Chinese chemical factories, but ended up in pharmaceutical products. That meant it fell into a regulatory void. No agency wanted to take control.

“You get buck-passing, frankly, between ministries,” said Mr. Skinner, the British regulator. “One ministry says, ‘It wasn’t my job to do that, it was this other ministry.’ ”

Even so, many experts argue that the capitalist excesses that have thrived during China’s economic transition have already sparked corrective action, not totally unlike the Progressive Era changes in the United States.

President Hu Jintao has pushed through a series of measures under the slogan of “scientific development” that aim to strengthen central regulators and economic planners, reduce abuses of low-wage workers, and protect the degraded environment.

He has met plenty of resistance, and it remains unclear how much he will pull back from China’s fast-growth development model.

Though some political and corporate forces argue that China needs to grow richer before it can address labor and environmental problems, there are few vested interests that defend the rights of fly-by-night factories to inject poison into medicine or leave the protein out of infant formula. With China’s reputation having taken a hit in the United States, resistance to tightening standards seems likely to fade.

“I think Chinese leaders are deeply alarmed,” said Dali Yang, a Chinese governance expert at the East Asian Institute in Singapore. “They will not let a tiny percentage of bad exports damage their reputation.”

Mr. Yang said that big Chinese cities have already demonstrated that they can do a better job monitoring food and drug safety than less developed counties and rural areas. Retail and restaurant chains and brand-name manufacturers have also gained market share versus small- scale operations, partly because Chinese consumers want to avoid fake or dangerous goods.

The state-run media has been given unusual latitude to expose shoddy goods. One of the most popular shows on China Central Television, “Weekly Quality Report,” investigates accidents, poisonings and cheap fakes. Recent topics include defective motorcycle helmets, a faux rabies vaccine, faulty tires and toxic food additives.

Even the United States F.D.A., which China considers a model of regulatory might, has issues that might sound familiar in Beijing. Its bureaucrats have complained that tight budgets and competition with 11 other federal regulatory agencies have made it harder to police the food supply.

And while that agency was created in the regulatory rush of 1906, it took more than 55 years, until the Kennedy  administration, for the F.D. A. to acquire the powers it sought to ensure a safe drug supply.

“I’d be surprised,” Mr. Yang said, “if it takes China that long.”

Jake Hooker contributed reporting.

liver411

July 20, 2007

Food for Thought on China Imports

The Motley Fool
July 19, 2007

Be careful about what you buy, and what you put in your mouth

I really didn't know which board this was best suited for, but this is as good a place as any. I have been nearly bed-ridden the past couple weeks, and I feel like venting a bit, because I don't know if anyone here really knows how vulnerable our food supply is, and my poor health has been proof of that. I've spent much more time here on the message boards because I couldn't do much other than sit around. Bear in mind I had not been to see a doctor for illness since early 2000 (7 1/2 years ago), so it is unusual for me to get sick. Before this experience, Shrimp has always been my favorite food, and I had never had an allergic reaction to food.

I got sick from shrimp imported from China. Either melamine or fluoroquinones, or both. The exact cause was not verified. My doctor only treated me for the resulting bronchitis/pneumonia symptoms I experienced from my resistance being down, but I'm past it now. I had experienced kidney pain, which melamine could cause, and my initial prescribed anti-biotic wasn't strong enough. The doctor had to prescribe a stronger one. Fluoroquinones create resistance to anti-biotics. I had eaten at Captain D's regularly over the past year, as my family liked to go there on family night, and I would normally get the shrimp. In addition, I ate twice in a short period, on June 19 and 21 (shrimp lover's meals both times- 32 pieces of shrimp total), and shortly after the second time had a severe reaction, and became quite sick for two weeks after that. I emailed Captain D's corporate office and received their standard “legal” response, but they did confirm that some of their supply is from China. I had to call the national Poison Control hotline to log my case in also. At the time I ate there, the news had not yet hit about the Chinese seafood scare.

As I've gone through this “ordeal” I have also read up on what is going on with our Chinese food supply, and here are the things you must know:

1. Seafood (obviously). Verify it is not from farmed Chinese sources. Supposedly the open ocean caught seafood, exported by China is okay. It is when they farm it inland that they use those chemicals, and that is shrimp or catfish especially. Here is what the two chemicals do:
Melamine poisoning – can cause bladder cancer, also kidney stones.
Fluoroquinones – strong anti-biotic, but when passed through food in this way, can cause you to develop harmful immunities to anti-biotics, preventing their effectiveness in future treatments.

2. Cough Syrup. Don't buy any cheap cough syrup. The same ingredient in the Chinese toothpaste has been found in cheap foreign cough syrup (deaths in Panama). No incidents reported here in the U.S., but no one has come forward to say all U.S. supplies are free and clear either.

3. Vitamin C. Begin to take a critical look at ingredients and labeling, Vitamin C is only one of many to watch. The Chinese control 90% of the market on the chemical used for this, and there are rumors of harmful metal content. The U.S. food and beverage companies may have to begin quality testing of the Vitamin C additive, rather than giving it a free ride. This is a developing story, but it appears that the testing for additives is not the same as for food by the FDA.

4. This list is longer, but you just don't know it yet, remember that.
“Since U.S. laws don't require food and drug sellers to label products with the country of origin of ingredients, it's impossible for consumers to know where food or supplements are coming from, not to mention what factory produced them.” See Seattle Times news link below.

Last, the leader in China who was their equivalent of our FDA chief was executed yesterday. That's how significant of an issue all this stuff is to them. (or perhaps it was better to silence some of them)

Links for the various stories or FDA sites on this stuff:

Execution of “FDA” official, cough syrup problem: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8Q9JE9G0&show_article=1

Chinese Shrimp problem http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2007/NEW01660.html

FAQ on the Seafood problem http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~frf/seadwpe.html

Vitamins and additives article http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003732744_vitamins03.html

FDA's Seafood page: http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/seafood1.html

Complicating the issue, there is also a U.S. problem with melamine in shrimp. http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2007/NEW01643.html

>> Read the complete article

特深沉

我曾经请一位大学老师写篇反映中国乙肝患者被歧视的文章。说到很多卖假药的广告时，他说：蛇油。西方历史上有很多种包治百病的蛇油。

蛇油已经成了假药的通用名词。

larrylarry

FDA是怎么管理在美国销售的中药？基本上所有中药都是以食品的名义进行销售，而且药效没有过期一说，除非药材本身潮湿或松散（源于自称是有经验的老中医）。

eryang81

厉害的...

冷月葬花魂__

411太牛了,我都想跟你学英语,要考研了，英语啥都不会呢![em04][em04][em04][em04]

dickens_yu

收藏，学习