President Obama has formally named Margaret Hamburg as his new Food and Drug Administration commissioner, and Joshua Sharfstein, Baltimore’s Health commissioner, as Hamburg’s deputy. Obama also announced the creation of a new Food Safety Working Group to be chaired by the secretaries of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture.
According to President Obama, chronic underfunding and understaffing has rendered the FDA capable of inspecting only 7,000 of 150,000 food processing plants nationwide, leaving 95 percent uninspected. “Part of the problem, said Obama, “is that the responsibility for food safety is spread over so many agencies, offices, and individuals. Other problems include a serious shortage of funding”
A serious funding shortage and understaffing doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of what troubles the FDA. The far more pressing problem is FDA corruption. There’s so many on the take at the FDA it would make your head spineven a group of their own scientists recently revolted against corrupt FDA managers. The scientists claimed: “There is extensive documentary evidence that managers..have corrupted and interfered with the scientific review of medical devices.”Indeed, a government watchdog concluded the FDA failed to regulate “the conflicts of interests of doctors who do clinical trials of drugs and medical devices used on human subjects”
Then there’s last year’s FDA cover-up of toxic melamine in US baby formula. As much as ninety percent of the infant formula sold in the US was contaminated with the stuff which is linked to serious kidney damage. Melamine can cause kidney and bladder stones as well as kidney failure and death. The FDA collected nearly 100 samples of infant formula made by U.S. manufacturers, then held a conference call to alert the manufacturers of their findings but withheld the test results from the public; they only released the results after the “Associated Press filed a Freedom of Information Act request, revealing that Nestle, Mead Johnson and Enfamil infant formula products were all contaminated with melamine”
The FDA has a history of intimate ties with the pharmaceutical industry. The agency approved “unsafe and ineffective medicine”for market from Ranbaxy Laboratories, even while Ranbaxy was being investigated by Congress. Think about that a second. Think how cavalier that isthink of the haughty disregard not only for the public the FDA serves, but lawmakers themselves.
“Allegations from reliable sources and supporting documents indicate a pattern of systemic fraudulent conduct, including submissions by Ranbaxy to the FDA that contain false and fabricated information,” the Department of Justice said.
“If these allegations are true, Ranbaxy has imperiled the safety of Americans in a manner similar to the generic drug scandal we uncovered twenty years ago,” said Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the committee chairman. “I would like to know whether FDA officials knew about these allegations and what, if any, action was taken.”
Not only is the FDA corrupt, they’re grossly negligent and incompetent. “In 2006, it was contaminated spinach,”said President Obama. “In 2008, it was salmonella in peppers and possibly tomatoes.”Hold on. Before the FDA determined the source of the salmonella outbreak to be peppers, they fingered tomatoes as the culprit; but it was never tomatoes. The FDA’s irresponsible and premature rush to judgment wiped out hundreds of thousands in revenue for those in the tomato industry.
Margaret Hamburg has an impressive past. Both her parents are physicians; her mother was the first black woman to attend Vassar College and the first to earn a medical degree from Yale, while her father was president of the Institute of Medicine for five years from 1975-1980. Margaret Hamburg herself is a graduate of Radcliffe College and Harvard Medical School. She became New York’s health commissioner in 1991. She slashed New York city’s tuberculosis rate in half and beefed uptheir food safety program. Because of her research in infectious diseases, she’s considered biodefense expert.
Hopefully, Hamburg’s appointment to head the FDA will be the equivalent of putting Serpico in charge of the then corrupt NYPD. I hope for her sake she isn’t thrown to the wolves.