News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently issued final guidance designed to help egg producers follow new rules for reducing Salmonella Enteritidis (SE) contamination.

(CIDRAP News) – Federal officials today released a progress report on the work of President Barack Obama's Food Safety Working Group, which has been buoyed by legislation passed earlier this year but faces challenges in implementing the law.

(CIDRAP News) – A federal auditor has found that the US Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) management of food inspections by state officials on the FDA's behalf has a number of weaknesses, including a failure in several states to ensure that inspections are completed and problems corrected.

(CIDRAP News) – The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) today said drug shortages tripled over the past decade while in related news the Obama administration announced steps to address the problem.

Marcia Crosse, PhD, the GAO's director of healthcare, presented a GAO report today during testimony on prescription drug shortages before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP).

(CIDRAP News) – Novartis's new cell-culture based influenza vaccine factory in North Carolina has begun making a prepandemic H5N1 flu vaccine and is ready to start producing vaccines for a real pandemic when needed, the company and federal health officials announced yesterday.

The facility in Holly Springs, N.C., billed as the first of its kind in the United States, was dedicated yesterday after a long testing process.

(CIDRAP News) – The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) got a head start on preparing a vaccine against the novel swine-origin influenza strain recently found in four states by using a slightly different swine-origin strain that cropped up last year, CDC officials said today.