fda

The Democrats’ bill placing the tobacco industry under the oversight of the Food and Drug Administration is on its way to the White House, having passed the Senate today, and party leaders are patting themselves on the back for their accomplishment. (Some lawmakers, after all, have been pushing this concept for decades.)
But Paul Smalera, writing [...]

All that’s left is the president’s signature. Here’s the statement from Paul G. Billings, vice president for policy and advocacy at the American Lung Association:
Today marks an historic culmination of a more than 20 year journey to provide the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) urgently needed regulatory control over the tobacco industry. This long [...]

The nicotine and other chemicals found in tobacco products might be addictive, and they might contribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States each year, but currently the Food and Drug Administration — charged with ensuring the safety of the products Americans ingest — has no authority to regulate the industry.
That’s getting [...]

While most GOP lawmakers are opposing legislation to tighten government regulations over the tobacco industry, one outspoken Republican is making statements not often heard from even the most liberal members of Congress. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) is pushing an outright tobacco ban. From The Hill:
“What we should be doing is banning tobacco,” Coburn said in [...]

The Senate this morning is poised to vote on a historic bill empowering the Food and Drug Administration to regulate the tobacco industry for the first time. The proposal, approved by the House in April, is expected to pass, but not without opposition from Southern lawmakers hoping to protect their famously regional industry. And this [...]

Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman (Calif.) and John Dingell (Mich.) introduced legislation yesterday granting the Food and Drug Administration more powers to monitor the nation’s food producers.
The Washington Post describes the bill as lending the FDA “broad new enforcement tools, including the authority to recall tainted food, the ability to ‘quarantine’ suspect food, and the power [...]

It may come a surprise to some that the government has tougher safety standards for Cocoa Puffs than for Marlboros, but under current law, the Food and Drug Administration has no power to regulate the cigarette industry.
House lawmakers took a step today to change that, passing legislation placing tobacco products under the regulatory eye of [...]

Since 2006, the Food and Drug Administration has ignored its own internal regulation and stopped requiring manufacturers of medical devices – such as pacemakers, heart valves and other life-sustaining inventions – to meet specific safety requirements before they are deemed safe enough to be implanted in humans.
As the Project on Government Oversight reveals in a [...]

The FDA has intensified its checks on produce coming into the United States since the Salmonella stpaul outbreak began, and has put 17 firms on notice that they need to watch contamination of their produce.