Product safety

It's OK for storm victims to live in them, but don't let your employees enter them: FEMA. Who else? The Federal Emergency Management Agency is barring employees from entering thousands of stored travel trailers over concerns about hazardous fumes, while more than 48,000 other trailers continue to be used by hurricane victims in Louisiana and Mississippi. FEMA is advising employees not to enter any of the roughly 70,000 trailers in storage areas across the country, but the directive does not apply to other trailers still in use, agency spokeswoman Mary Margaret Walker said Thursday. (AP; hat…
I've been to plenty of scientific meetings sponsored by federal agencies in the last several years where we have either had to do weird back door stuff just to have coffee breaks as part of the program or if we are sponsoring it and inviting federal scientists and staff they have to go off and have lunch on their own nickel so they won't run afoul of conflict of interest regs. They would be taking a "gift" from us if they ate food we paid for. OK. I get the principle. Some of it is bureaucratic and dumb but where do you draw the line? Now I find out where the big guys draw the line: The chief…
If you were an organic farmer you might be a tad pissed if the government came along and sprayed your crop with pesticide without your consent, essentially spoiling it. But that's what happened near Sacramento north of the American River between July 30 and August 1, as the local mosquito control district did aerial spraying to "control" mosquitoes that might be carrying West Nile virus. They aprayed 86 square miles (55,000 acres), home to 375,000 people: Lab tests by Environmental Micro Analysis, an independent lab in Woodland, showed crops from at least one farm in Citrus Heights were…
With all the concern about contamination of imported food ingredients, especially from a major exporter like China, you'd think the US Food and Drug Administration would be eager to make whatever information it has available to US food producers as quickly as possible. You know what's coming next: Lee Sanders, a senior vice president with the American Bakers Association, requested FDA documents on imported honey in 2002. The Washington-based association wanted to know about a pesticide in honey imported from China, she said in an interview. "You would hope that those types of requests would…
You probably don't know what PDUFA is (pronounced pah-doofah) but it's about to expire. Which is good. If they let expire. "They" are our friends in congress. PDUFA stands for the Prescription Drug User-Fee Act and it is an integral part of the FDA drug safety program. You know. The one that brought us Vioxx. I wish I had the great cartoon I saw at the time of the Vioxx trial that showed a bottle of medicine with a label on it that said, "FDA Approved Drug." On the label was a small box that said: "Warning: contains FDA approved drug." So what's PDUFA? The idea behind PDUFA sounds very…
Here are two separate but related stories. One is about lunch boxes (h/t Melanie of Just a Bump in the Beltway fame). One is about cronyism and sucking up to business in the Bush Administration. First lunch boxes: Story #1, lunchboxes: In 2005, when government scientists tested 60 soft, vinyl lunchboxes, they found that one in five contained amounts of lead that medical experts consider unsafe -- and several had more than 10 times hazardous levels. But that's not what they told the public. Instead, the Consumer Product Safety Commission released a statement that they found "no instances of…