Just two ESPN.com posts from me this week, although there’s more coming up next week:
* A long post on Wilmington (Kansas City) and Myrtle Beach (Texas) prospects.
* This week’s Klawchat transcript.
Many of you are asking about Behind the Dish. I don’t have an answer for you yet. I’m sorry. Feel free to let ESPN know you want the show back soon.
And now, for this week’s five links of interest:
- The new whooping cough vaccine isn’t as good as the old one. Good job, good effort, guys. Meanwhile, the disease is spreading in countries where it had been mostly wiped out.
- Also from Science News, the tetraquark, a particle comprising four quarks – a charm, an anticharm, a down, and an anti-up. Got that?
- A reader suggestion: a NY Times piece on when journalists get too close to sources. I’m certainly friends with a lot of my sources in the industry, so this is something I grapple with regularly.
- The FDA might be backing off its latest anti-microbrewery regulation. The FDA wanted to effectively kill off the centuries-old process of breweries selling their spent grains to animal husbandry operations for feed. Craft breweries have fought back, and they might have won enough of a change in the regulation to matter. Two salient points: Spent grains apparently make great bread, and the FDA is a horrible waste of taxpayer money that should be overhauled or killed off entirely.
- Injectable oxygen particles? The discovery appears to be over a year old, but the impact would be enormous. I for one welcome our new anaerobic overlords.
While I can’t speak for the agency as a whole, I’m a research chemist with the FDA. I have a ton of respect for your work and, if you’re interested, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what FDA is/isn’t doing that concerns you. No need to post this comment.
S: I don’t mind discussing this at all, and I should qualify that my criticisms of the FDA are on policy questions, many of which are functions of Congressional actions rather than FDA management.
A few examples:
1. Allowing prophylactic use of antibiotics in livestock. This policy, which leads to greater antibiotic resistance, is a crime against humanity.
2. Setting onerous requirements for new drug approvals, which deter development of new drugs and delay their arrival in the marketplace. Much of this dates back to Congressional action post-thalidomide.
3. Executing food-safety laws that favor factory-farming/large-scale producers and impose excessive costs on small farmers and producers.
4. Banning trans fats. We know they’re bad. Just put it on the damn labels.
5. Fighting raw-milk sales. Again, the risks are widely known. This is just a waste of government resources.
I could go on, but those give you an idea. There’s a general attitude of favoring large producers over smaller ones on the food side of the FDA’s mission, and an attitude of worrying more about efficacy than focusing on safety on the drug side. (To say nothing of the non-regulation of “supplements,” but that’s another Congressional failure.) Whether this is a cultural issue or just a question of badly written mandates, I do not know.