In recent weeks the Food and Drug Administration has been involved in two separate ongoing sagas, with very different implications for public health. The first of these involves the highly publicized public health menace that has to date resulted in the recall of about 500 million eggs for poisoning from salmonella bacteria from a group of Iowa farms, with the prospect of more to come. The early returns indicate that to date the recall has focused on 14 states from Indiana in the east to California in the west. At this point about 2,000 people have been infected, none fatally, or about three times the normal total. No one quite knows where the infection has worked its way into the complex food chain, which makes it difficult to know how best to combat the disease. No one hears a word about how the FDA has overstepped its proper role in its desperate effort to get a handle on the situation.
Continue reading Richard Epstein at Forbes.com…
(photo credit: nebarnix)
