Breaking Up the US FDA…
Will President Trump Divest the FDA?

Click here (http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/112/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26405) to tell Congress to divest the corrupt and inefficient FDA and USDA of their food regulatory responsibilities before they kill more of us!
In the last in a long, long string of documented failures, shortcomings and tragic errors by the FDA, a recent report documents that the FDA is not only prejudiced and biased, but so riddled with conflits of interest, now not even considered a problem at the failed agency, that there is no way to trust the honesty or accuracy of the decisions of the agency.
While this study looks at one aspect of the impact on drug regulation, food regulation is the same, only worse.
There, the same problems apply, along with the intentional down-regulation of food to support the pharmaceutical markets which profit from the poor drugs approved by the drug regulatory side of the FDA house since degraded food makes people sicker quicker, and makes the profit picture derived from the drugs to treat those illnesses stronger longer.

The picture is a dismal one but there is at least one solution: divest the FDA (and its equally corrupt partner in food crime, the USDA) of all food responsibilities. Rather than creating an new agency, as is currently being discussed by Congress, which will not deal with the fundamental issues and their deadly consequences, the answer, be believe, is to divest the Federal Government of all food regulatory responsibility and instead turn those responsibilities over to the unit of government which the people can impact: State governments.

This is an urgently important concept and must be enacted, even as numerous States are asserting their soverignty from the corrupt and dangerous United States.

Please support the Natural Solutions Foundation in its efforts to make food save once again, protecting food and freedom.

You can donate to the Natural Solutions Foundation at http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=189. All US donations are tax deductible.
Spread the word and ask everyone you know to join the Health Freedom eAlerts, http://drrimatruthreports.com/?page_id=187, for up to the minute information and Action Items.

Please take a moment to help us Divest the US Government of its food regulatory responsibilities here http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/568/t/112/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26405 and then spread the word!

Yours in health and freedom,
Dr. Rima
Rima E. Laibow, MD
Medical Director
Natural Solutions Foundation
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FDA Not Effectively Monitoring Investigator Conflicts of Interest, HHS Watchdog Says

Neil Osterweil
Information from Industry
Assess clinically focused product information on Medscape.
Click Here for Product Infosites – Information from Industry.

January 16, 2009 — More than one third of new drug marketing applications approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were missing information about potential conflicts of interest for clinical trial investigators, which could allow bias to creep into the approvals process, a government report released this week has found. The FDA has said that it agrees with most of the report’s findings.

Federal regulations require clinical trial sponsors to collect financial information from investigators at the outset of trials, and to report on their efforts to minimize the possibility that financial self-interest could color trial results, notes the report from the office of Daniel R. Levinson, Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Trial sponsors — usually the company developing or licensing the drug or device in question — only have to disclose this information when they apply for marketing approval, and even then there’s a loophole: they can claim that they “acted with due diligence” to collect financial information from each investigator to satisfy regulations.

Report Found Few Financial Disclosures

Yet 42% of new drug marketing applications filed in fiscal year 2007 were short on investigator financial disclosures, and in fully one fifth of cases where such information was disclosed, FDA reviewers took no action, the watchdogs reported.

“In FY 2007, only 1% of clinical investigators disclosed a financial interest,” the report’s authors write. “By way of comparison, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that between 23% and 28% of academic researchers had financial interests in medical companies. Further, we found a number of limitations in FDA’s oversight, leaving FDA unable to determine whether sponsors submit financial information for all clinical investigators.”

In addition, the HHS inspector general’s staff found that FDA can’t verify whether relevant information has been collected on all investigators because of incomplete data and the lack of on-site verification procedures.

Collection and review of such information should be routine, as should appropriate action when required, and all of it should occur before a trial ever gets off the ground, contends a former FDA reviewer interviewed by Medscape Medical News.

“You want to intervene at a time when there’s an ability to do something about it,” said John H. Powers III, MD, now an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the George Washington University (GWU) and University of Maryland Schools of Medicine.

“To have a situation where the sponsor has already done the trial, submits the information, and then the FDA says ‘you have conflicts of interest with your investigators,’ puts the sponsor in a bad spot, the investigator in a bad spot, and it puts the FDA in a bad spot. It seems to me that if you’re going to regulate here that you should do it a proactive manner,” he said.

“Management Failure”

Federal regulations concerning drug marketing approvals require that “adequate measures are taken to minimize bias on the parts of the subject, observers, and analysts of the data,” Dr. Powers noted, yet one of the most common sources of potential bias — investigator relationships with industry — are overlooked or ignored.

“This is a management failure,” said David B. Ross, MD, PhD, a former FDA reviewer who is now a clinical assistant professor at GWU. “The managers who have set this policy have done nothing to enforce it and there are no consequences, and the reason is that nobody thinks it matters; they’re kind of doing this for show.”

When Dr. Ross was at the FDA, he and other reviewers warned agency management that a study used to support approval of the antibiotic telithromycin (Ketek, sanofi aventis) was marred by per-patient payments to investigators of up to $400, and, in at least one case, by fraud on the part of the investigator who enrolled the most patients (she was later sentenced to 57 months in federal prison), and by “serious violations in trial conduct” in 9 other trial sites, leading to 4 referrals for criminal investigation.

Despite the warning, and despite ongoing concerns about reported hepatotoxicity from the drug, FDA management failed to take substantive action in response to reviewer concerns, a failure that Dr. Ross said is emblematic of the agency’s apparent indifference to the possible influence of investigator financial relationships with industry.

“…CDER [the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research] is not doing that good of a job, and with what they do track, what are they doing with it? It’s like having laws against speeding and not writing any tickets,” Dr. Ross said.

Relationships Can Have Profound Effect

Eric G. Campbell, PhD, an associate professor at the Institute for Health Policy and the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, said that financial considerations — whether honoraria, consulting fees, stock options, or direct payments — can have a profound effect on which trials get published or promoted.

“The important thing to remember is that relationships with industry — they may not always be conflicts — are ubiquitous in all aspects of medicine, medical research, and medical regulatory affairs,” Dr. Campbell said. “If a study is funded by a drug company to investigate its product and if the investigator also has relationships with that company, you can be darn sure that if the study makes it to publication, it’s going to favor that product,” he said.

Like Dr. Ross and Dr. Powers, Dr. Campbell pointed out that lax or absent regulatory oversight implies a lack of concern and a tacit acknowledgment of a lack of enforcement of existing rules.

“The bottom line is that if you don’t report stuff and nobody pays attention to whether it’s reported or not, you’re just signaling that it’s not important and that nobody cares, and clearly that’s the message that FDA is sending out,” he told Medscape Medical News.

Key Findings

The report, prepared by staff from the Chicago regional Office of Evaluations and Inspections in the HHS Inspector General’s Office, was based on reviews of financial forms, attachments, and accompanying FDA review notes for all 118 marketing applications approved by the agency in fiscal year 2007. The watchdogs also reviewed FDA regulations and guidance, conducted structured interviews with FDA officials, and surveyed FDA reviewers.

The key findings were:

* 1% of clinical investigators (206 of 29,691) disclosed a financial interest.
* FDA does not have a complete list of clinical investigators and does not use on-site inspections to confirm that submitted financial information is complete, meaning that reviewers cannot determine whether sponsors have submitted financial information for all clinical investigators
* 42% of FDA-approved marketing applications were missing financial information, 23% of approved marketing applications were missing a certification or disclosure form or required attachments, and in 28% of applications, sponsors used the due-diligence exemption to indicate that they were unable to provide complete financial information.
* FDA did not document a review of any financial information for 31% of marketing applications. Reviewers who followed a review template were more likely to include financial information than those who did not.
* In 20% of applications with disclosed financial conflicts, neither the FDA nor sponsors took action.

The Inspector General’s recommendations for the FDA were as follows:

* Ensure that sponsors submit complete financial information for all clinical investigators.
* Use a complete list of clinical investigators to check that sponsors have submitted financial information for all.
* Require that sponsors submit financial information for clinical investigators as part of the pretrial application process.
* Check that sponsors have submitted all required attachments to financial forms.
* Update guidance to sponsors regarding the due-diligence exemption.
* Add a review of financial information to the on-site inspection protocol.
* Ensure that reviewers consistently review financial information and take action in response to disclosed financial interests.
* Require that all centers consistently use a template that includes a prompt to document a review of financial information.
* Provide additional guidance and training to reviewers.

FDA Replies

In response to a request from Medscape Medical News for comment, FDA spokesperson Karen Riley sent a statement noting that the agency agreed with all of the HHS recommendations except the one stating that the FDA should request information from clinical investigators prior to trial initiation.

“The intent of clinical investigator financial disclosure is not to discourage investigators from being included in the study,” the FDA response says. “Rather, it allows sponsors to identify and manage potential conflicts throughout the development of a regulated product, from design through the conduct of the clinical trials.”

The statement goes on to say that this recommendation for financial disclosures before trial initiation could needlessly add to “the complexity and cost of the clinical trial enterprise with no commensurate gain in the protection of human subjects or the quality of the data.”

This pretrial disclosure recommendation is not meant to be punitive or burdensome, Dr. Powers said, but it recognizes the fact that bias, whether intended or not, can slip into the process whenever money is involved.

“When people bristle at regulations, I always think of James Madison’s quote,” he remarked. “Madison said that ‘If all men were angels, no government would be necessary.’ The reasons why we do these things is not because everybody is inconsistent or immoral: it’s because some people are. It seems onerous to people who have no intention of doing the wrong thing, but unfortunately these rules are written for people who aren’t going to do the right thing.”
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/586980?sssdmh=dm1.423642&src=nldne