Analysis Of The FDA: The Poison Squad By Deborah Blum

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Hope Wang 6 th Hour 2/22/24 Researched Argument FDA: The Influences Behind America’s Food Safety The creation of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was a journey. One difficult enough to have a book written about. The Poison Squad, by Deborah Blum, is a novel describing “one chemist’s single-minded crusade for food safety at the turn of the twentieth century.” In this novel, she explores the journey and many hurdles of Harvey Wiley’s goal for food safety in America, which ultimately led to the passing of the Food and Drug Safety Act— leading to the creation of the FDA. However, multiple in the novel, Blum points out that Wiley, the Father of the Food and Drug Safety Act, did not act independently. He was helped by countless other people, …show more content…

However, despite it’s large role, surprisingly, the FDA is largely funded by user fees, which are fees that corporations pay to get their products reviewed for approval. This creates the interesting scenario where the FDA is receiving funding from the people they’re supposed to be facilitating — and therefore are incentivized to get (and accept) more applications. Although since the allowance of user fees, FDA’s resources and efficiency have dramatically increased, the same cannot be said for the quality of the checks. Since the FDA has allowed funding from user fees, there has been an increase in the approval of new drug applications, “from 38% in 2005 to 61% in 2018.” With this heightened approval rate, we also see a heightened recall rate as “before the user fee act was approved, 21% of medications were removed or had new black box warnings as compared to 27% afterwards.” User-fees may of made the FDA faster and more efficient, however, is the clumsiness that came with it worth …show more content…

The FDA, like all other government agencies, experiences lobbying and high amounts of it. Companies, who are concerned about their product approval, spend hundreds of thousands - if not millions - of dollars lobbying the FDA to approve or maintain their products, and it works. From 2012 to 2019, there were 46,522 recalls with 40,330 of them being related to non-lobbying firms and only 6,192 of the recalls being for lobbying firms. With this, lobbying firms also received less severe recall classifications, on average, with lobbying firms having a mean classification of 2.00 and non-lobbying firms having one of 1.82 - the higher the number the better. Not just that, companies that lobbied experienced an easier process with the FDA since “lobbying reduces the number of days to approval.” Since the FDA is partially funded by companies, they are incentivized to keep products on the market to receive more money from companies lobbying and submitting more projects for approval. Interestingly enough, this bias towards lobbying companies “only appears in food recalls, but not in drug and device recalls.” This is a very common

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