House Gives U.S. FDA More Power to Police Drug Safety
This week, The House of Representatives approved legislation that gives the FDA more power to police the safety of prescription drugs, sending the measure to the Senate for final approval.
What if the the Food and Drug Administration required drugmakers to study the safety of their products after they go on the market? Would that be so terrible? Would it be a bad thing for regulators to order warnings added to prescribing information? If these measures can help save lives and prevent more illnesses, I think not.
This new legislation may be able to prevent future repeats of what happened with Vioxx, the Merck & Co. painkiller, allegedly linked to heart attacks and strokes, and Avandia, GlaxoSmithKline Plc's diabetes pill linked in some studies to a risk of heart attacks.
I hope that Representative Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, is correct in his assessment that the legislation ``provides FDA with critical tools the agency has been desperately lacking in its efforts to protect the American public from unsafe drugs". Now let's see if the Senate agrees.
Click here to read more on this new FDA legislation from Bloomberg News.
