Understanding Government

Denise Grady’s insightful report in the New York Times makes it clear why it’s so hard to remove the plastic bisphenol-A, or BPA, from various products — and from our own bodies.  The reason is America’s general approach to food and product safety.  This approach puts the onus not on industry, but on scientists (in and out of government), who must prove that it a product is unsafe after it has already been introduced.  Grady contrasts our approach to that of the European Union, which favors the “better safe than sorry”  method for approving the use of chemicals people are going to ingest.   Seems like in America, it’s better sorry than safe. (more…)

By Marci Greenstein

National Institutes of Health chief, Dr. Frances Collins was talking up his agency’s partnership with the Food and Drug Administration on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show last week.  The move is intended to speed up the process for getting drugs from laboratories to the marketplace.  What’s surprising is that this collaboration hasn’t happened sooner.  How often have we heard about patients desperate to get drugs that are successful in clinical trials but are moving at a snail’s pace through the FDA’s regulatory maze? (more…)

Barack Obama has said that the National Institutes of Health may approve the use of about 700 embryonic stem cell lines for research if the stem cells were obtained ethically, reports the Washington Post’s Shankar Vedantam. There are clear parameters for what is an ethical procedure like that the embryo was destroyed after an in vitro fertilization and donors gave their consent to use the lines for scientific research. But, ultimately, what stem cell lines can be used is up to NIH: Obama has empowered scientists to figure out what lines should be used to research illnesses. His trust of bureaucratic scientists on this touchy political issue is a welcome break from the Bush administration.-MB

The Bush administration has been full of federal agency heads who uncritically accept the scientifically dubious beliefs of the White House (see Johnson, Stephen). But National Institutes of Health Director Elias Zerhouni, who resigned yesterday, was never one of them.

The New York Times’ Gardiner Harris reports that Zerhouni’s greatest- and most controversial-contribution in his six years as director was a ban on NIH scientists consulting with drug makers. The ban followed years of Congressional investigation into how much government scientists were on the take from drug and medical device companies. Zerhouni also publicly went against President Bush’s call for limits on federal financing of stem cell research.

Zerhouni says he plans to write a book about his time in the Bush adminstration. It may or may not provide juicy details about the suppression of scientific evidence. Regardless, Zerhouni walks away from the Bush administration with his integrity intact.-MB

The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima and Rick Weiss report that a National Institutes of Health laptop computer with the records of 2,500 patients was stolen from an NIH worker’s car in February. The records contained years of the patient’s medical information, but the NIH didn’t inform the patients until last Thursday. Indeed, the NIH response to the security breach seemed based on the institute’s biweekly board meetings.

The records could have been made secure had information technology personnel encrypted the data. This never happened, though, and now NIH joins the club of an estimated 19 federal agencies that have recently left citizens vulnerable to identity theft.  Read Nakashima and Weiss here.   MB