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...employees, current budget $21.854.000), and two-thirds of its inspectors police purity of food products; the rest work on drugs and cosmetics. Its main power over drugs comes from a 1938 law (passed after an early version of sulfanilamide in a poisonous solvent killed 107 people) that authorizes FDA to require satisfactory prelicensing proof that a drug is safe...
Chloromycetin. which is Parke. Davis' trade name for the potent antibiotic chloramphenicol. got FDA approval in 1949. It attacked many bacteria against which penicillin was useless, notably the typhoid bacillus; equally important, it was the first effective drug against psittacosis (caused by an unusually large virus) and against such diseases as typhus, scrub typhus and spotted fever (caused by related microbes called rickettsiae ). Not until 1952, when hundreds of thousands of patients had had the drug-often for viral respiratory infections against which neither it nor any other antibiotic is effective-did evidence arise that it had caused...
...believes that quackery went out with the river boats and snake-oil peddlers, that it can't happen now. Instead, said Ribicoff, extravagant claims of earlier times have given way to "the illustrated brochure, the medicine-show extravaganza to the television commercial." Among the quacks now under FDA attack, Ribicoff pointed out by way of a modern horrible example, are peddlers of bottled sea water, priced at up to $20 a gallon, as a "preventive and panacea for virtually all human ailments...
Placenta & Plankton. FDA Commissioner George P. Larrick singled out one large area of fraud: "There is extensive, big-time quackery in the cosmetics field, generally based on the exploitation of some 'miracle' ingredient that is supposed to restore youth and beauty to the unattractive or aging skin." Sample miracle workers: "human placenta residues, plankton from the water of a certain spring in France, pig skin extract, shark oil and orchid pollen...
Another rich field for quackery is gadgets, and the FDA had a rogues' gallery of them from court cases it has recently won. The "Ortho-Structurometer," a posture adjuster, was falsely claimed to be effective for tuberculosis, asthma, heart conditions and ear-nose-throat infections. A San Francisco outfit got into space-age labeling with the "Oscilloclast," "Oscillotron," "Dipolaray" and "Depolatron." A Southern California chiropractor achieved the ultimate in low fidelity by distributing an endless-tape recording of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. The machine emitted no music, but the promoter claimed that vibrations, transmitted through electrodes, cured cancer...