By: Margaret Hamburg, M.D.

I’d like to introduce you to FDA Voice – FDA’s newest communications vehicle designed to give you information from behind the scenes here at FDA, and in our own words.

FDA Voice is a new forum for us.  Although I am writing the first blog post, in the future you will see posts from a wide range of FDA officials and staff, including scientists and public health professionals, employed at headquarters here in the Washington DC area, across the United States, and in posts abroad in countries as far away as China and India.

Through FDA Voice, we hope to give you insights on some of the most pressing public health issues of the day. For example, how does globalization affect the food that we eat? How is the pace of innovation affecting the availability of new medical treatments for you and your family? What does personalized medicine mean for me? And even, what is the latest on food safety for my pet?

I believe that providing a forum like this is especially important for an agency like FDA, where the products that we regulate are directly related to public health and the issues that we work on tend to be complex in nature. FDA Voice will give FDA employees the opportunity to go beneath the surface to tell you about what they are working on and how it impacts your life.

No matter which stakeholder group you consider yourself a member of – consumer, patient, medical professional, scientist, researcher, or industry – it is our hope that you will find this medium an unparalleled opportunity to get more details directly from the source, like details of an official trip, activities in the lab, or more background information about a policy issue or regulation.

You will find FDA Voice on our homepage – and you may notice some additional changes there today as well. We have given the homepage a cleaner look and feel – by updating the design and reducing the number of links on the page. We have been working hard to improve your experience at FDA.gov, and hope that the changes we have made will help you find the information you need as quickly and easily as possible.

As Americans living in the Information Age, we are always looking for new and better ways to communicate. I am glad that you decided to take time out of your day to stop by and read FDA Voice, and I hope you will make it part of your routine in the future.

On behalf of all of the employees at FDA, I wish you and your loved ones a very happy holiday season.

Margaret Hamburg, M.D., is Commissioner of the U. S. Food and Drug Administration.