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FDA chief lays out plans for healing the agency

www.newsobserver.com

The Food and Drug Administration has increasingly come under fire for not doing its job.

In the past four years, the agency that regulates about 20 percent of the U.S. economy has been criticized for exposing patients to medicines that do more harm than good, letting contaminated imports get into the country and failing to protect the food supply.

Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, an oncologist and cancer survivor who was appointed head of the FDA in 2006, was in the Triangle on Thursday to talk about initiatives started on his watch to treat the ills of the agency.

During a conference that brought about 200 health-care executives to the SAS campus in Cary and included a visit to The News & Observer, Eschenbach said the FDA is in the middle of fundamentally changing how it operates, expanding its traditional role as a gatekeeper. Switching from paper to electronic data is a big part of the change, which Eschenbach sees continuing after the next president appoints a new FDA commissioner following the election in November.

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