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The FDA Turns 100

A century ago, the federal government formed a small group of chemists called the Bureau of Chemistry to curb the sale of dangerous medicines and adulterated and rotten food.

One hundred years later, that agency – which has evolved into the U.S. Food and Drug Administration – oversees 9,000 employees and an overwhelming list of responsibilities, that includes not only food safety and prescription drug approval, but also cosmetics, medical devices, biological products, dietary supplements and food-borne terrorist threats.

While the agency remains chronically underfunded, its ability to tackle seemingly insurmountable challenges that affect the health and safety of millions of Americans has earned it recognition among some as “the little engine that could.”

Among its challenges over the years have been the advent of new technologies, spawning Internet drug sales and sophisticated counterfeit drugs; the ability to measure toxicants in increasingly smaller amounts, causing the agency to redefine safety standards; and an increasingly mobile society that brought once-distant food-borne illnesses closer to home.

For example, food safety concerns for the agency a century ago focused on the sale of spoiled and rotten foods or those that were dishonestly adulterated to appear fresh when they weren’t. While the means have changed, the overriding problem of food-borne illness remains a problem for the agency, which reports nearly 80 million cases of food-borne illness annually in the United States. The threat of terrorist contamination of food and the introduction of parasites once limited to developing countries (brought here through foreign food imports) have also greatly expanded potential food safety problems.

To read more about the FDA and its history and challenges, click here.

To read more about this and other environmental health issues, go to: www.environmentalhealthnews.org, www.ourstolenfuture.org, or www.healthandenvironment.org