THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, August 30, 1994 TAG: 9408300011
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 49 lines
Food and Drug Administration head David Kessler has announced he is about to undertake a massive overhaul of the nation's food-inspection system. Leave aside for a moment the fact that the American food supply, long one of the safest in the world, has been getting cleaner and safer over the years. The real issue is: Why is a man presiding over an agency that has a yearslong backlog of approving potentially life-saving drugs constantly detouring to side issues?
Dr. Kessler is a bureaucrat's bureaucrat. Since being appointed by President Bush in 1990, he has won headlines for himself by such stunts as bursting into supermarkets and seizing 2,000 crates of orange juice he said were incorrectly labeled ``fresh.'' FDA rules now occupy 4,270 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations. And the jump in the number of FDA employees, from 4,470 in 1970 to 9,217 today, is increasing due to Kessler's far-flung initiatives.
There is no evidence that there is a crisis in food labeling or handling. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta reports that the vast majority of food-borne illnesses are caused by improper handling of food by consumers once they get it home, not by industry.
And even though the FDA is quick to regulate, it is often terminally slow in doing what most Americans expect it to do, which is approve lifesaving drugs. Drug manufacturers have been held in limbo, sometimes for up to a decade, waiting for FDA approval of drugs that are already deemed safe by the medical community and regulators in other nations.
Among the FDA's more infamous delays was the nine years it took to approve beta-blocker compounds that treat hypertension and other cardiovascular disease, a delay that Forbes magazine estimates could have been responsible for as many as 10,000-plus deaths annually.
Dr. Kessler seems to have his priorities mixed up. He is eager to take urgent action against businesses that he seems to believe delight in maiming and poisoning their own customers. Meanwhile, the things real people expect the FDA to take care of are languishing.
Dr. Kessler is in the business of bureaucratic empire-building at the expense of the public good. He should kick the habit or, if he won't, Congress should do it for him. by CNB