Does Obama Working Group Portend an FDA Breakup?

[babylonsister]

http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/balance_of_power/2009/03/does-obama-working-group-porte.html

Does Obama Working Group Portend an FDA Breakup?

By Adriel Bettelheim | March 16, 2009 11:36 AM


President Obama's decision to create a Food Safety Working Group is heating up speculation in public health circles about the possibility of splitting off some of the Food and Drug Administration's functions and parceling out oversight and inspection duties to the Department of Agriculture or a new government agency.

The working group, which Obama announced over the weekend in his radio address, is to advise the president on how to update food safety laws and better coordinate agencies' response to incidents like the peanut butter scare. That presumably includes deciding whether to add resources to the FDA, an agency that's come under intense criticism in recent years for its slow response to health risks associated with popular painkillers like Vioxx, lax oversight over vitamins and dietary supplements and failure to head off outbreaks caused by contaminated lettuce, peppers and spinach.

Calls to create a new agency already are reverbrating in Congress, where Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., chairwoman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees agriculture spending and the FDA, has floated legislation (HR 875) to establish a Food Safety Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services. And Obama more than subtly hinted that the agency is stretched thin when he noted in the address that FDA only has the resources to inspect 7,000 of the nation's 150,000 food processing plants and warehouses each year.

more...

http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/balance_of_power/2009/03/does-obama-working-group-porte.html