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Welcome to Andy’s Take.
Remember stories of the problems with melamine contaminating your pet’s food? Illegal substances in heparin causing serious reactions in patients? And most recently, bacteria in food causing thousands of people across the country to get sick? How can FDA keep up with all these challenges and deal with all the issues?
My Take is that to do more to protect and promote your health, FDA needs more people. Using the resources Congress and the Administration have provided, we have begun that process. Within the past 6 months, we have added 1,300 exceptionally skilled experts from physicians and scientists, to inspectors and investigators, and we are not finished recruiting at FDA.
But we are not just hiring more people, we are being strategic in how we use our new workforce. One very important new strategy is to establish FDA offices beyond our borders, in China, India, Latin America, Europe, and eventually, in the Middle East. As you are reading or listening to this message, our office in China is being established and our Director is preparing to leave for Beijing to take up his post. And we are underway with opening our offices in India, Europe, and Latin America. We want FDA experts to be right there at the source of production of food and medical products you depend upon.
But we must do even more than hire and deploy more people for new programs. These talented public servants also need better tools. This past week our Information Technology Modernization efforts reached a new milestone in bringing us state-of-the-art hardware for our infrastructure and we are launching new data management systems.
FDA is growing and developing to being bigger, better and stronger in protecting and promoting your health.
I look forward to giving you next week’s Andy’s Take.
Andy
Andrew C. von Eschenbach,
M.D.
Commissioner of Food and
Drugs
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