Maryland / Regional
Searching for a Cure-All
(Washington Post)
Court filing error results in disclosure of Social Security
numbers, health data (dcexaminer)
AIDS in the District Is Serious, But Not Critical
(Washington Post)
School sets forum
before sex show
(Salisbury Daily Times)
National /
International
AP IMPACT: Nursing home patients endangered by younger,
mentally ill Residents
(Baltimore Sun)
Experts say splitting up FDA could speed drug approvals while
improving food safety
(Baltimore Sun)
Opinion
---
Maryland / Regional
Searching for a Cure-All
Human Genome Sciences' Future Rides on Success of New Treatments
By V. Dion Haynes
Washington Post
Monday, March 23, 2009; D01
Rockville-based Human Genome Sciences is still reeling from Wall
Street's unexpected drubbing earlier this month in reaction to
the biotech company's long-awaited study of a hepatitis C drug
it is developing for a mass market.
The late-stage clinical trial showed that the drug, called
Albuferon, requires hepatitis C patients to take injections only
half as often as with a competing product used to treat the
liver ailment. That's good news for patients, who would be
subject to nasty flu-like side effects accompanying the
injections much less often.
But the disappointing news was that the drug is effective in
about one out of two patients tested -- a success rate that is
no better than another hepatitis C treatment already on the
market. The company, whose stock price plunged 67 percent, to 55
cents a share, with the news, is seeking to win back Wall Street
with the forthcoming results from the trial of a drug it is
developing for the auto-immune disease lupus.
"We're confident that should [Albuferon] be approved, we will
have a successful product -- a leader in the treatment of
hepatitis C," said H. Thomas Watkins, the company's president
and chief executive.
But Jason Kolbert, managing director of health-care research at
ThinkEquity in New York, said he was dismayed that many patients
opted out of the study, an indication to him that they were
dissatisfied with the treatment. "If more people are dropping
out, that defeats the purpose, which is to have a more tolerable
drug."
Kolbert said he is fearful the company may not get government
approval for the drug and said that it would be disastrous given
the firm's $400 million in convertible notes due within the next
few years. If Human Genome Sciences does not market the drugs
before the notes are due, he added, "we're worried that the
company lacks cash flow to pay off that debt and that it could
get into trouble."
The difficulties facing Human Genome Sciences are replicated
throughout the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, which are
under increasing pressure to garner huge profits from their drug
treatments to recoup hundreds of millions of dollars in research
and development costs. The process, which takes a dozen or more
years, is becoming more competitive and more expensive.
Moreover, analysts say the Obama administration's proposals to
curb health-care costs -- including encouraging the use of
generic drugs over expensive name-brands -- would make it more
difficult for the companies to make money.
"Biopharmaceutical" companies, which develop their medicines by
chemical or biological means, spend five times as much as their
counterparts in other industries on research and development,
according to the Congressional Budget Office. The cost, coupled
with the economic downturn, has sparked widespread mergers and
job cuts among drug companies.
In recent months, Roche completed its takeover of Genentech, an
effort aimed at consolidating their cancer programs. Pfizer
acquired Wyeth, becoming the nation's largest pharmaceutical
company. Merck merged with Schering-Plough, a plan aimed at
diversifying its operations and cutting costs by eliminating up
to 16,000 jobs.
Human Genome Sciences was established in 1992, sparked by the
international effort to identify all 20,000 genes in human DNA.
Working in second-floor labs in a mirror-glass building in
Rockville, scientists harvest cell cultures for use in drugs
aimed at combating anthrax, hepatitis C, lupus, diabetes,
cardiovascular disease and cancer.
Despite the debt, company officials say they believe their
balance sheets are in good shape. The company sold its property
and is leasing it back, a deal that generated $380 million. The
company this year will earn $155 million from a contract with
the federal government to produce an anthrax antidote and is
looking to secure additional orders. And the company has the
potential to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties
from GlaxoSmithKline once a cardiovascular drug it is developing
based on Human Genome Sciences' technology goes to market.
Company officials say they will seek Food and Drug
Administration approval for the hepatitis C drug this year and
the lupus drug next year. Given the cold response the hepatitis
C medication received from Wall Street, company officials say
they recognize the need to wow critics with their lupus drug.
Lupus, largely diagnosed in young women, causes the immune
system to attack bodily systems, such as the skin, kidneys,
lungs and brain. Patients suffer from a variety of symptoms,
including fatigue, rashes and renal disease.
Currently, there is no drug developed specifically for lupus.
Doctors typically treat patients with chemotherapy and steroids,
which have shown decidedly mixed results in controlling lupus.
The treatments often have nasty side effects: weight gain, bone
loss and infections.
The company's lupus drug, called LymphoStat-B, is designed to
block the process in which the body produces antibodies that
attack healthy cells. Early trials showed improvement in half
the patients on the lupus drug compared with improvement in 30
percent of patients in the control group, officials said.
Terence C. Flynn, senior vice president for equity research and
emerging biotechnology at Lazard Capital Markets, said the
chances of the drug succeeding are small given recent failures
of lupus drugs under development by Genentech and LaJolla
Pharmaceuticals.
But Barry A. Labinger, Human Genome Sciences' executive vice
president and chief commercial officer, disagreed.
"There's no good drug available for lupus," he said. "From a
regulatory and a market standpoint, a drug that shows a good
benefit for patients with lupus will be welcomed" by consumers.
Copyright 2009 Washington Post.
Court filing error results in disclosure of Social Security
numbers, health data
By Freeman Klopott
dcexaminer
Sunday, March 22, 2009
A filing error in Maryland’s federal court resulted in health
insurance information for 226 people - including 42 Social
Security numbers - being made available to the public for more
than two weeks.
Public access to the information regarding patients of
Washington area doctors Ali Al-Attar and Abdul Fadul was blocked
Friday after
The Examiner told the FBI that the information was accessible
through an Internet court database.
The private information of Washington area residents was
included in requests for warrants to search the doctors’ offices
in Suitland,
La Plata, Oxon Hill and Falls Church as part of a health care
fraud investigation. The warrants were marked as being sealed
and, therefore, were not supposed to be made public.
Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein’s spokeswoman Marcia
Murphy declined to comment. The error has privacy experts
outraged.
“It’s totally unacceptable,” said Lillie Coney, associate
director of Electronic Privacy Information Center, a
Washington-based lobbying group. “Identity theft is the fastest
growing crime in the United States and it’s primarily driven by
criminals obtaining Social Security numbers.”
Moreover, Coney said, releasing information regarding people’s
doctors and health insurance claim numbers could be a violation
of federal health privacy laws. “If they’re seeing a physician
or specialist, it may expose a medical condition,” Coney said.
Several of the people on the list are employees at the Embassy
of Egypt, the embassy’s Deputy Chief of Mission Amr Ahmed
Ramadan said. At least four of the names were on a U.S. State
Department list of senior Egyptian Embassy employees.
The now sealed sworn statement by FBI agent Marisa L. Perez said
Al-Attar and Fadul charged insurance companies more than $2.3
million for services their patients did not receive. Many of the
false claims used names of patients who work at the Embassy of
Egypt, Perez wrote.
Of the 226 people who had their health care policy numbers,
birthdays and names made public, 92 used the health care company
the embassy provides for its employees.
The doctors allegedly used the name of one embassy employee to
claim he went to three of the doctor’s clinics every 26 days
between May 2007 and August 2008 to have the same testing done
each time, Perez wrote. The insurance company paid the doctors
$55,000 for more than 400 procedures for that one patient.
Ramdan told The Examiner that embassy employees have to pass a
physical before they can go abroad, so they’re “generally
healthy in the first place.”
Perez made no indication in her statement that any of the
embassy employees were suspected of wrongdoing.
Copyright 2009 dcexaminer.
AIDS
in the District Is Serious, But Not Critical
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post
Sunday, March 22, 2009; B01
District health officials brought new attention to AIDS in our
city last week. But many key trends shown in the report got lost
amid the alarm. Although the epidemic is serious -- and more
extensive than most suspected -- the report also suggests that
the situation is in some ways improving, and has been for years.
New cases of full-blown AIDS are down. AIDS deaths are down. The
headline-grabbing fact that the District's HIV rate rose to 3
percent, though troubling, is largely a product of
antiretroviral drugs that allow patients to live longer and
better lives. Little in the data suggests, as many commentators
have last week, that we are experiencing a burgeoning,
African-style epidemic.
I spent the last seven years reporting in Washington and Africa
for The Post. In many places I visited in Africa, morgues
overflowed with shrunken bodies. People flipping through old
snapshots came across face after face of dead friends. One
Kenyan man I interviewed had lost almost his entire extended
family to AIDS. In Washington, there has been nothing like that
scale of devastation since antiretroviral drugs arrived.
"If they're talking about an epidemic that's out of control, or
that things are getting worse, that's just not in the data,"
said epidemiologist Rand L. Stoneburner, a former New York City
health official who has worked extensively in Africa for the
World Health Organization and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS,
Tuberculosis and Malaria. "You go into Nairobi, and you get a
much higher prevalence."
That's not to minimize what is happening in Washington. The city
has concentrations of high-risk groups: men who have sex with
men, injecting drug users and people who have spent time in
prison, where anal sex and drugs are major transmitters of HIV.
The report also suggests some heterosexual transmission, mainly
among African Americans and Latinos.
The D.C. Health Department's top AIDS official, Shannon L. Hader,
deserves praise for the groundbreaking research. But Hader's
comments that AIDS here is "on par with Uganda and some parts of
Kenya" muddied the picture.
"I wouldn't carry the comparison to developing countries too
far," said Jim Curran, dean of Emory University's Rollins School
of Public Health and a former top AIDS official at the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some African nations do have HIV rates of 3 percent, but the
variation on the continent ranges from 26 percent in Swaziland
to nearly zero in North Africa. In Uganda, which Hader compared
with the District, it's 6 percent, according to a study in the
Journal of the American Medical Association last year. In
Uganda's urban areas -- a far better comparison with Washington
-- it's 10 percent.
There are even bigger differences in the pace of new infections.
If Washingtonians were getting HIV as quickly as urban Ugandans,
the capital would have more than 10,000 new infections a year.
The D.C. report doesn't give a comparable calculation, but such
a rate seems unlikely. The federal Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention estimate that there were 56,300 infections last
year in the entire nation. The number of new cases of full-blown
AIDS in Washington, meanwhile, has been falling since 1993
(aside from a statistical blip in 2002 caused by a tracking
system change). It reached 648 last year. AIDS deaths are down
since 1994.
What's clearly rising here is the number of people surviving
with AIDS because of medicine not easily available in most
African countries. Another striking difference between the
situation here and the one in Africa is that more than
three-quarters of Washingtonians with AIDS are in their 40s or
older, making clear that more and more people here are living
with the disease rather than dying from it.
When I asked Hader whether she had any evidence of a rising
infection rate in Washington, she agreed that there was none but
left open the possibility that improved HIV surveillance may yet
turn up some. "We know there's a lot of ongoing transmission
that's preventable," Hader said. That's true. All HIV
transmission is preventable. But successful programs are built
on careful science and precise portrayals of what's happening.
I worry about the hyperbole surrounding Washington's AIDS
problem, because the response in Africa was long hindered by
inaccurate data flowing out of the United Nations along with
unreliable characterizations of the epidemic's path.
The result was poor decisions. President Bush's big anti-AIDS
program, for example, poured much of its resources into some
relatively modest epidemics, such as Rwanda's, while Swaziland,
with an infection rate that's eight times worse, got much less.
So what's happening in Washington? And what should we do?
The city has a severe, mature AIDS epidemic that is causing much
less death and sickness than during its peak 15 years ago.
Antiretroviral treatment is now widely available. Improving
medical services will continue to better the lives of people
with the disease. Expanded HIV testing efforts will help get
people into treatment earlier.
To take another step toward eliminating new HIV infections, a
main target must be drug users, who make up about one in four
new cases in Washington. Routine availability of clean needles
would help, and should be possible now that the federal ban on
needles programs here has been lifted.
To slow sexual transmission, which accounts for at least 60
percent of the spread in the city, one comparison with Africa
might prove useful. Research shows that HIV moves quickly in
some regions of the continent because of the widespread sexual
networks created when people have intercourse with more than one
partner in the same month or year. The same is true for sexual
transmission anywhere, whether it's men with men or men with
women.
Hader's proposed solutions, mainly condom promotion and HIV
testing, are not enough. The African countries that have seen
steep drops in new cases of HIV, such as Uganda and Zimbabwe,
first had large drops in casual sex and long-term, concurrent
sexual relationships with multiple people.
Any effort to finish off a declining epidemic would make sexual
behavior priority No. 1. School sex-education programs in the
United States have traditionally emphasized either condoms or
abstinence to prevent HIV, but they have shied away from
discussing the risks of several concurrent sexual relationships.
Programs focusing on those issues are "as important [as], and
possibly more important" than condom promotion, said Doug Kirby,
a researcher who has studied the relationship between AIDS and
sexual behavior in the United States and in Uganda.
Several African countries are making that shift, with ads that
directly target sexual behavior. The subject is even more
sensitive there -- polygamy is an ongoing practice in some
places -- than it is here. Most countries in the AIDS epicenter
of southern Africa have begun or are planning campaigns on the
issue.
We'll know that a similar seriousness has arrived in Washington
when the rhetoric cools and the billboards that I've seen in
Botswana and Swaziland start appearing here, too.
Craig Timberg covered D.C. politics and Africa for the Post.
He is writing a book, "Dr. Livingstone's Children: Why We Are
Losing the War on AIDS, and How to Win." He'll be online Monday
at 11 a.m. to take reader questions. Submit your questions
before and during the discussion here.
Copyright 2009 Washington Post.
School sets forum
before sex show
Associated Press
Salisbury Daily Times
Sunday, March 22, 2009
WILLIAMSBURG, Va. (AP) — The Sex Workers' Art Show is coming to
the College of William and Mary for the fourth consecutive year.
But first, the school will conduct a public forum to let people
express their opinions about the controversial show that
features strippers, prostitutes and other sex workers performing
and talking about their jobs.
The forum is set for Monday afternoon, the show for that night.
The show is always well-attended by William and Mary students.
But some alumni and community members say the show portrays the
university in a negative light. Some state legislators also have
complained.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
National / International
AP IMPACT: Nursing home patients endangered by younger, mentally
ill residents
Associated Press Medical Writer
By Carla K. Johnson
Baltimore Sun
Sunday, March 22, 2009
CHICAGO (AP) — Ivory Jackson had Alzheimer's, but that wasn't
what killed him. At 77, he was smashed in the face with a clock
radio as he lay in his nursing home bed.
Jackson's roommate — a mentally ill man nearly 30 years younger
— was arrested and charged with the killing. Police found him
sitting next to the nurse's station, blood on his hands, clothes
and shoes. Inside their room, the ceiling was spattered with
blood.
"Why didn't they do what they needed to do to protect my dad?"
wondered Jackson's stepson, Russell Smith.
Over the past several years, nursing homes have become dumping
grounds for young and middle-age people with mental illness,
according to Associated Press interviews and an analysis of data
from all 50 states. And that has proved a prescription for
violence, as Jackson's case and others across the country
illustrate.
Younger, stronger residents with schizophrenia, depression or
bipolar disorder are living beside frail senior citizens, and
sometimes taking their rage out on them.
"Sadly, we're seeing the tragic results of the failure of
federal and state governments to provide appropriate treatment
and housing for those with mental illnesses and to provide a
safe environment for the frail elderly," said Janet Wells,
director of public policy for the National Citizens' Coalition
for Nursing Home Reform.
Numbers obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and
prepared exclusively for the AP by the Centers for Medicare and
Medicaid Services show nearly 125,000 young and middle-aged
adults with serious mental illness lived in U.S. nursing homes
last year.
That was a 41 percent increase from 2002, when nursing homes
housed nearly 89,000 mentally ill people ages 22 to 64. Most
states saw increases, with Utah, Nevada, Missouri, Alabama and
Texas showing the steepest climbs.
Younger mentally ill people now make up more than 9 percent of
the nation's nearly 1.4 million nursing home residents, up from
6 percent in 2002.
Several forces are behind the trend, among them: the closing of
state mental institutions and a shortage of hospital psychiatric
beds. Also, nursing homes have beds to fill because today's
elderly are healthier than the generation before them and are
more independent and more likely to stay in their homes.
No government agency keeps count of killings or serious assaults
committed by the mentally ill against the elderly in nursing
homes. But a number of tragic cases have occurred:
— In 2003, a 23-year-old woman in Connecticut was charged with
starting a fire that killed 16 fellow patients at her Hartford
nursing home. A court guardian said Leslie Andino suffered from
multiple sclerosis, dementia and depression. She was found
incompetent to stand trial and committed to a mental
institution.
— In 2006, 77-year-old Norbert Konwin died at a South Toledo,
Ohio, nursing home 10 days after authorities said his
62-year-old roommate beat him with a bathroom towel bar. Sharon
John Hawkins was found incompetent to stand trial.
— In January, a 21-year-old man diagnosed with bipolar disorder
with aggression was charged with raping a 69-year-old fellow
patient at their nursing home in Elgin, near Chicago. A state
review found that Christopher Shelton was admitted to the
nursing home despite a history of violence and was left
unsupervised even after he told staff he was sexually
frustrated.
Jackson's roommate was 50 and had a history of aggression and
"altered mental status," according to the state nursing home
inspector's report. Solomon Owasanoye wandered the streets
before he came to All Faith Pavilion, a Chicago nursing home,
and he yelled, screamed and kicked doors after he got there.
On May 30, 2008, he allegedly picked up a clock radio,
apparently while Jackson slept, and beat him into a coma.
Exactly what set him off is unclear. Jackson died of his
injuries less than a month later. Owasanoye pleaded not guilty
to first-degree murder, and after a psychiatric review was ruled
unfit to stand trial. He now lives in a state mental hospital.
All Faith Pavilion co-owner Brian Levinson said his staff is
trained to deal with aggressive behavior, and he disputed state
findings that Owasanoye had a history of aggression. The
for-profit nursing home was fined $32,500 for failing to prevent
the assault.
Under federal law, nursing homes are barred from admitting a
mentally ill patient unless the state has determined that the
person needs the high level of care a nursing home can provide.
States are responsible for doing the screening. Also, federal
law guarantees nursing home residents the right to be free from
physical abuse.
Families have sued in hopes of forcing states to change their
practices and pressuring nursing homes to prevent assaults.
Advocates say many mentally ill people in nursing homes could
live in apartments if they got help taking their medication and
managing their lives.
The problem has its roots in the 1960s, when deplorable
conditions, improved drug treatments and civil rights lawsuits
led officials to close many state mental hospitals. As a result,
some states have come to rely largely on nursing homes to care
for mentally ill people of all ages.
Also, mixing the mentally ill with the elderly makes economic
sense for states. As long as a nursing home's mentally ill
population stays under 50 percent, the federal government will
help pay for the residents' care under Medicaid. Otherwise, the
home is classified a mental institution, and the government
won't pay.
In Missouri, more than 4,400 younger mentally ill people are
living in nursing homes, in part because of a state program that
helps the elderly stay in their own homes longer.
Nursing homes "are looking at 60 to 70 percent occupancy, and
the statistics tell us they've got to be in the 90s to operate
successfully," said Carol Scott, the state long-term care
ombudsman for 20 years. "They're going to take anybody they
can."
Gaps in staff training leave the homes inept at handling the
delusions and aggression of the mentally ill, said Becky Kurtz,
the state long-term care ombudsman in Georgia, where nearly
3,300 younger mentally ill people live in nursing homes.
"Often they'll say, 'I hate it there. I'm angry. I don't want to
be there.' Sometimes the behavioral issues are the result of
being ticked off you're in a nursing home," Kurtz said.
Pat Willis of the Center for Prevention of Abuse said she has
seen elderly residents terrified by younger, mentally ill
residents who scream and yell, day and night. "The senior
residents are afraid," Willis said. "They would prefer to sit in
their rooms now and keep the doors shut."
Nursing home operators say protections against frivolous
transfer or discharge keep the homes from throwing out some
mentally ill residents.
"Many times, the nursing home's only option becomes dialing
911," said Lauren Shaham, a spokeswoman for the American
Association of Homes and Services for the Aging.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Experts say splitting up FDA could speed drug approvals while
improving food safety
By Matthew Perrone
Baltimore Sun
Sunday, March 22, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — As momentum builds to rework the nation's
food-safety system after a salmonella outbreak linked to
peanuts, the drug industry is hoping for a happy side effect:
faster approvals for new medicines.
Drug industry advocates are quietly allying with some of their
longtime critics pushing to split the Food and Drug
Administration into two agencies, one for food safety and one
for medical products.
President Barack Obama bolstered hopes for a breakup last
Saturday when he named two public health specialists to the
agency's top positions and appointed an advisory group to
reassess the nation's decades-old food safety laws.
Drug executives see a chance to speed up drug approvals that
have lagged amid a drought of new products, provided their
regulator is no longer distracted by high-profile food-safety
breakdowns.
"Every CEO that I know in health care is in favor of this, but
none that value their share prices will go on the record for
fear of retribution from the FDA," said Steve Brozak, president
of WBB Securities, an investment brokerage focused on drug and
biotech companies.
While FDA's food and drug staffs are separate, Brozak and others
believe the public lashings over food outbreaks have made senior
officials even more risk-averse on drug approvals. Even before
the recent food safety problems, FDA was under pressure from
Congress for failing to catch problems with drugs like Merck's
Vioxx, which was pulled from the market in 2004.
"The history of FDA is that the commissioner focuses on medical
products and only turns to food safety when a crisis comes up,"
said Professor Michael Taylor, a former FDA and U.S. Department
of Agriculture official now at George Washington University.
This year, the agency will spend just 73 cents on food safety
for every dollar spent on drugs, according to the Institute of
Medicine.
Recent outbreaks connected with spinach, lettuce, peppers and
tainted milk from China have created a drumbeat for change.
Margaret Hamburg, a former New York City Health Commissioner,
has been tapped to address these issues as Obama's pick for FDA
commissioner. Her deputy will be Joshua Sharfstein, a
pediatrician and critic of the safety of children's cold
medicines.
One former FDA official said Obama's appointment of two safety
experts suggests he favors splitting the agency.
"Peggy Hamburg is a safety and security expert, and it seems
pretty clear she would become administrator of the food agency,"
said Peter Pitts of the Center for Medicine in the Public
Interest, an industry-funded advocacy group. "Josh Sharfstein
would then slide over" to head the drug agency.
The FDA's associate commissioner for food, Dr. David Acheson,
would only say, "The agency welcomes all discussions about ways
to make our food supply even safer."
The drug industry's lobbying group has not taken a position on a
new drug agency. But the group's president says the status quo
is unacceptable.
"One of our premier scientific agencies that's responsible for
all of our health and safety is still living in the 19th century
in many ways, and we shouldn't tolerate that," said Billy
Tauzin, head of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of
America and a former congressman from Louisiana.
The distraction created by food crises is wreaking havoc on the
drug industry and its investors, making it harder to predict
which drugs the agency will approve, Brozak and others say.
"That makes for a completely untenable position for people
trying to make decisions in the health care capital markets,"
said Brozak, who ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2004.
Last year the FDA missed review deadlines on more than 12 drugs,
or more than 20 percent of those received, analysts estimate.
The agency's internal goal is to miss no more than 10 percent.
FDA officials have blamed one-time problems, including an influx
of new staffers.
Experts say there's no reason the agency that assures the safety
of complex, $3,000-a-month biotech drugs is also tasked with
regulating $3 jars of peanut butter.
The Government Accountability Office endorsed a single food
agency in 1999, and lawmakers have been trying unsuccessfully to
realize it ever since.
Splitting FDA would likely mean reshuffling committees that
oversee food and drug regulation, which could diminish clout and
contributions for some lawmakers.
"Once you get an idea like this on Capitol Hill, it creates
winners and losers in power and dollars, and when that happens,
it usually results in a stalemate," said Patrick Ronan, a former
FDA staffer and founder of GreenLeaf Health consultants.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., have
narrowed their proposals in order to gain support.
DeLauro previously aimed to consolidate food responsibilities,
including the USDA's, into one agency, which proved to be
politically tricky. Her current bill would carve a separate
agency out of FDA with additional powers, including ordering
recalls, which are now voluntary, and increasing food
inspections.
The Congresswoman said she welcomes Obama's formation of a food
safety task force, but showed no sign of backing away from her
proposal. The task force must not be "merely a cosmetic
bureaucratic endeavor," she said in a statement.
"The working group must produce definitive recommendations that
result in the modernization of our food safety regulatory
structure."
Durbin's bill similarly would expand FDA powers and would add
$775 million to its budget to bolster food safety. Currently,
the FDA's $1.9 billion federal budget is supplemented by more
than $300 million in application fees paid by drugmakers to fund
speedy reviews.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Opinion
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