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Key elements of food safety law stuck at White House regulatory agency
By Nancy Watzman May 7, 2013 11:20 a.m.Regulations designed to improve food safety have been languishing in an obscure White House office.
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As summer growing season starts, produce safety rules delayed
By Nancy Watzman Apr 26, 2013 9:02 a.m.As the nation's farmers enter a new growing season two years after 33 people died and 147 people were sickened in 28 states after eating listeria-infested canteloupe from a Colorado farm, the produce industry has effectively delayed implementation of a law intended to improve food safety.
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Drug databases missing from data.gov
By Nancy Watzman Jul 28, 2010 12:34 p.m.The Food and Drug Administration maintains 11 crucial drug databases available to the public on the agency website. However, if you tried to look them up on Data.gov, the administration's flagship site for organizing government data, you wouldn't have any luck finding them.
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OGD: FDA to launch product recall database
By Nancy Watzman Jun 16, 2010 2:23 p.m.When salmonella outbreaks were discovered last year in peanut butter and pistachios, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took action by posting information about affected products on its web page, creating a widget where consumers could do look-ups, and providing a downloadable database of the information--all of which proved tremendously popular. Starting this fall, the public will have access to a similar database containing details about all food, drug, and medical device recalls that occurred throughout the year, according to agency officials.
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"Heart of the Matter" Finalist for Journalism Award
By Nancy Watzman Apr 16, 2010 11:05 a.m.We're honored to announce that our investigative piece, "The Heart of the Matter: How Congress and Special Interests Kept Crucial Clinical Trial Data Secret," is a finalist for the NIHCM Foundation's Sixteenth Annual Health Care Journalism Award.
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OGD: Freeing health care data
By Nancy Watzman Mar 10, 2010 9:11 a.m.We're still tracking government's performance under the Open Government Directive, and we're also asking for specific information to be released. Here's the data we'd like to see on food and drug safety, which we posted over at the Department of Health and Human Services "open" Web page. The agency set up this commenting system as part of President Barack Obama's open government directive. Please take a moment to visit and vote for our suggestions. (Unfortunately the HHS comment format made our paragraphs run together and slightly truncated our comment. This is fixed below.) We'll be posting more of these at other /open pages in the coming days and weeks.
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FDA Lags USDA in Accessible Food Safety Data
By Jim Morris Feb 15, 2010 5:13 p.m.Salmonella in peanut butter. E. coli in cookie dough. Tainted Serrano peppers. Fetid Chinese seafood. All these recent problems fell within the domain of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which shares food inspection responsibilities with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The USDA inspects meat, poultry and some egg products while the FDA monitors everything else. Food-safety advocates say the USDA is more forthcoming about its inspection activities and are prodding the FDA to do better.
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FDA's transparency effort has new features, old content
By Nancy Watzman Jan 12, 2010 6:26 p.m.Hot off the cyber-presses is this new Web site section from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), designed to tell us viewers what the agency does and how it does it, in plain and simple language. The agency says this is its first step in its transparency initiative, and that it represents its response to comments from the public, which wants "basic information about the agency in a user-friendly, accessible format."
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How well do popular drugs work?
By Nancy Watzman Aug 27, 2009 3:27 p.m.Here at Real Time we are beginning to dig into examples of secret data--data the government collects, that could affect our health and safety, but we, the public, can't see.
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