Food & Drug Safety

The Food and Drug Administration would be given sweeping new powers to order drug recalls, regulate advertising and mandate changes in labels under a bill passed by the Senate yesterday. The bill signals a fundamental shift in the FDA's role, the New York Times reports, requiring the agency to track drugs after, as well as before, approval. More »

Doctors are paid millions of dollars by drug companies to give their patients anemia medicine which regulators now say may be dangerous. Spurred by competiton between several similar drugs, companies reward doctors with rebates, which allow them to make a significant profit, the New York Times reports. More »

Add cyanuric acid to the list of industrial chemicals found in the contaminated pet food that killed thousands of dogs and cats. Like melamine, it was used by Chinese animal feed producers  to fake higher protein content in their wheat and rice products, the New York Times reports. More »

American drugmakers are on the lookout this week for another in the growing list of potentially deadly Chinese exports. This time, it's diethylene glycol, a sweet-but-toxic chemical that masquerades as glycerin in common medications like cough syrup and that has already killed almost 400 people—many of them children—in Panama.  More »

More than 8,000 deaths of cats and dogs that may be linked to melamine-tainted food have been reported to the FDA in the two months since the pet food recall. The statistics come as the FDA tries to assure Americans that the tainted protein concentrates, also fed to hogs and chickens, aren't a human health threat. More »

Chinese authorities have jailed the head of a company accused of selling pet food makers  the melamine-contaminated gluten that's killed thousands of cats and dogs. The detention of Mao Lijun suggests Beijing is eager to cooperate with the FDA investigators currently on its turf, after initially disavowing any gluten sales to the U.S. at all. More »

The FDA appointed a food safety czar yesterday, as the news that 3 million chickens had been fed melamine-tainted feed exacerbated growing public anxiety about food safety. The FDA said the chickens weren't recalled because most of them would have been sold by now, and the melamine was too diluted to be a health hazard for humans. More »

The battle over genetic modification has a new player: "pharming," or pharmaceutical farming, which uses genetically modified plants to mass-produce drug compounds relatively inexpensively. By altering common plants—for instance, tobacco, which can be engineered to produce an HIV drug—researchers say pharming could transform the treatment of illnesses that primarily affect third-world countries. More »

The compound that tainted pet food and is being blamed for hundreds of pet illnesses and deaths is a commonly used additive in animal feed in China, reports the New York Times . The coal derivative melamine, used in plastics and fertilizers, is nitrogen-rich, which triggers tests for protein content. More »

The FDA knew for years about problems at the peanut butter plant and spinach farms that led to major disease outbreaks, but took minimal steps to redress them. The agency's food safety arm can't keep up with the explosion in the amount of food it is supposed to regulate, the Post reports, and expects processors to police themselves. More »

The chemical which contaminated over 100 brands of pet food—with disastrous results for dog and cat lovers—may have been intentionally added by Chinese manufacturers in an effort to fudge nutrition ratings on their rice protein and wheat gluten. "That's still a theory, but it certainly seems to be a plausible one," the FDA’s chief vet says. More »

Researchers are linking a dramatic drop in the number of breast cancer cases to the decline in estrogen consumption by menopausal women. Women dropped hormone replacement therapy en mass after a 2002 study tied it to breast cancer risk. Other scientists argued that the decline—about 16,000 fewer new cases per year—may have other causes. More »

Genetically modified corn is the culprit in the disappearance of honeybees, according to a theory offered by a beekeeping expert, says Salon.  In a German study, the corn itself, which contains built-in pesticides, didn't kill the bees, but it seems to have damaged their intestines, making them vulnerable to parasites. More »

Men whose mothers ate a lot of beef during pregnancy have lower sperm counts, finds a study attempting to track the effect of growth hormones fed to cattle. While the specific chemicals weren't identified, sons of pregnant women who ate beef more than seven times a week were three times as likely to have sperm counts below the fertility threshold. More »

Still smarting from this fall's E. coli outbreaks, the produce industry is trying to coax Americans into eating their greens again with high-tech solutions. Companies like Dole and Western Growers are using radio-frequency tags and GPS surveillance to track veggies as they move from farm to grocery store. More »