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The Boston Globe, home town paper of Senator Ted Kennedy, Chair of the Senate Health, Environment, Labor and Pensions Committee, ran two important commentaries on the FDA this week.
First was an editorial yesterday strongly urging Congress to pass a strong FDA reform bill, including restricting financial conflicts of interests for advisory committee members.
Today the Globe ran an oped coauthored by David Michaels and me, again calling for leaders in Congress to ensure that the final bill (it is now in “conference” between the House version and the Senate version) come out as strong a bill as possible.
Take a look, I hope the Senator does!
Susan Wood is Research Professor at George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services, where she is part of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP).
When a man with extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) is told not to board a plane and then does so anyway, you have to expect the public health bloggers to come out in force. Tara C. Smith at Aetiology has been on top of this from the start, first laying out the story, then explaining its implications, and finally letting readers know why indignation is necessary for responding to a case like this. Revere at Effect Measure explores the legal angle of isolation and quarantine, and provides details about air circulation in aircraft cabins; that blog also features a post about XDR-TB that was published just before this news hit the wires. The Examining Room of Dr. Charles and Cervantes at Stayin’ Alive chide us for focusing on the threat of contracting XDR-TB when we should be concerned about larger problems, and N=1 at Universal Health suggests that this kind of communicable disease problem might increase the U.S. demand for universal healthcare.
In a lead-up to the June 13th Leadership Forum on Pandemic Preparedness the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is hosting a Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog. During its first week, bloggers – including Greg Dworking, founding editor of the Flu Wiki and Flu Wiki Forum – focused on the need to prepare; now, they’re looking at the roles different kinds of leaders can and should play.
Elsewhere:
by Revere, cross-posted on Effect Measure
On December 11, The Institute of Medicine, one of the four constituent parts of the National Academies of Science, released a “letter report” reviewing the scant information on effects from non-drug measures to slow or contain spread of an influenza pandemic (available as a free download here). The report was produced after a special workshop on October 25 in which the panel participants heard from a variety of experts, with subsequent deliberations that produced the summary letter report and its recommendations.
