regulation

The hubbub over the Republican congressional leadership's blatant failure to protect the minors under their custodial care in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal should be (but isn't) just the opening shot in a larger story of the hypocrisy of right wing (aka, conservative) politicians about "protecting our children." At any moment, state inspectors can step uninvited into one of the three child care centers that Ethel White runs in Auburn, Ala., to make sure they meet state requirements intended to ensure that the children are safe. There must be continuing training for the staff. Her…
We've posted about this before (here and here) when it was still in the middle distance, but now it's a disaster just over the horizon. It's the National Uniformity for Food Act (S.3128) (aka The Food Industry Protection Act), poised to become law if it passes the US Senate. It is a blunderbuss aimed at California's Proposition 65 which requires warnings for food ingredients that may cause cancer or birth defects. If it passes it will take down that state law and another 220 or so other state and local safety and labeling laws as collateral damage. The food industry won't mourn those little…
Indonesia has come under strong criticism because its agriculture department has been unable to cope with the avian influenza epidemic in its backyard and commercial poultry. Among other things, Indonesia doesn't have an effective mandatory surveillance program for the infection in birds. Guess who else doesn't have one? The U.S. Agriculture Department's failure to develop a "comprehensive" program to monitor for bird flu could leave the country unprepared if an outbreak happens, a bipartisan group of senators said on Friday. In a letter to Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns, six lawmakers…
The world's leading science journal, Nature, has been hitting editorial home runs lately. This week it's a real prize, "Safety catch." The subject is the Bush administration's proposals for how the government should go about conducting risk assessments. Risk assessments are a sensitive topic with many consumer and community groups who have experienced them as elaborate exercises in government decision justification. There is so much latitude to how the knobs of the risk assessment machine can be tweaked to make the output come out right, that many people see the process as one where the risk…
The US Food and Drug Administration is celebrating its centenary, but a good proportion of its scientists are not so thrilled with what it has become. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) just released a survey of 997 FDA scientists, co-sponsored by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility to a total of 5918. This is not the world's best response rate, so the results can't be claimed representatives. But what it revealed is disturbing in itself. One hundred eighty three scientists in this sample reported they "have been asked, for non-scientific reasons, to inappropriately exclude…