The Food and Drug Administration yesterday announced the beginning of a new program called the Sentinel Initiative that will begin monitoring how medicines already in the marketplace are affecting people's health.  As Gardiner Harris of the New York Times reports, the effort was accelerated after  widely-prescribed drugs like Vioxx were ...

The Huffington Post’s Linda Cronin-Gross flags a report that recalls done by the Consumer Product Safety Commission are at an all-time high this year. According to the advocacy group Consumers Union, the independent federal agency is on track to recall 800 products this year—70 percent more than in ...

At a Congressional hearing Tuesday, Democratic leaders declared that the FDA should get $300 million to inspect foreign manufacturers of drugs. It now gets $10 million. Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said at the hearing that $250 million would be sufficient to ...

Since November, House leaders John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) have relentlessly admonished the Food and Drug Administration for not fulfilling its regulatory mission.

Yesterday the lawmakers held a hearing that focused on the agency’s current inability to inspect imported drugs. The Wall Street Journal’s Corey Boles ...

The Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton reported yesterday on an under-resourced Food and Drug Administration bowing to industry wishes. More than 100 studies have reported health concerns about bisphenol A, a chemical compound found in many everyday plastics.

But the FDA has decided not to regulate the ...

A tight budget can be a good tool for fiscal discipline, but when you're talking about safe food and medicines, a little more funding can help.  Still, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Andrew C. von Eschenbach is coming down on the side of economy.  Both Democrats and Republicans on ...

The National Institute’s of Health Toxicology Program released a report yesterday that bisphenol A, a chemical found in 93 percent of all U.S. patients’ urinary tracts, could lead to everything from cancer to stunted growth. The chemical is found in plastic containers from baby bottles to the linings of ...

The Food and Drug Administration never inspected a Chinese plant that was making the blood thinner heparin. The result is around 20 deaths and example 1A of an agency crying out for more staff and a strategy to deal with testing drug imports. 

The FDA has since directed some ...

The New York Time’s Gardiner Harris lays out in stark terms the situation facing the Food and Drug Administration. Nineteen deaths have been linked to a blood thinner, produced in a Chinese manufacturing plant FDA inspectors only examined when the damage was done. There are ...

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has been banging the drum loudly that the FDA is understaffed and overwhelmed. A committee report released yesterday bolstered those charges.  It found that the agency has only one taken meaningful enforcement action after finding a spinach packing facility unsanitary. ...