Posted on May 13, 2014
by FDA Voice FiDA highlight
By: John Swann,
Ph.D.
Looming sentry-like
over the collection of artifacts that document FDA’s history, the
products we regulate, and our interactions with the public is a rather
large and curious figure. It is a green velvet head with bulbous, languid eyes
and two upper teeth in an otherwise large and empty mouth. It doesn’t have ears
or hair, but is marked by a few bright green pustules. This is part of a
life-size costume, an element of a public education campaign called Fight Bac!
in which FDA was a major participant. It began in the 1990s to alert the
public, young and adult alike, to the dangers of food-borne diseases and how to
avoid them.
Countless objects in
our collection tell the decades-long tale of FDA’s educational activities. For
example, the agency still
has a cabinet and some of its contents from the “Chamber of Horrors” exhibit
that traveled around the country in the early 1930s to alert citizens,
legislators, the press and others of the need for a stronger consumer
protection law, drawn from egregious examples of how the law then in place fell
short. FDA officials also communicated through a variety of other
displays for Congressional testimony and other purposes.
Much of the
collection captures the problems that gave rise to the laws and regulations we
have today, a regulatory
arc often originating with a problem product—sometimes of disastrous
proportions. Thus one can find specimens of:
▪
Elixir
Sulfanilamide, a poisonous preparation of a wonder drug in 1937;
▪
thalidomide,
the globally marketed sedative that caused thousands of grave birth
defects in the 1950s and 1960s;
▪
Bon Vivant
vichyssoise, a botulism threat in the early 1970s;
▪
the ill-designed
Dalkon Shield intrauterine
device that caused thousands of pelvic infections; and
▪
ephedra-containing
dietary supplements from the 1990s that killed several users.
These are among the
objects that eerily illustrate why we have the laws and regulations we do.
Decision-making in
the agency depends to a considerable extent on investigations and analyses,
some of the tools of which are documented here. These artifacts of the growth
of regulatory science include:
▪
balances and early
calculating devices used in the laboratories of the Bureau of Chemistry from
the 1900s to 1920s to analyze questionable foods and drugs;
▪
triers, tools used
for routine sampling of various foods to ensure compliance with the law, from
the mid-20th century; and
▪
advanced analytical
devices from the 2000s to detect sophisticated counterfeiting of medicinal
products.
Treatments of
dubious value for both serious and non-serious diseases make up a significant
part of the collection as well. There are hundreds of fraudulent medications,
primarily up to about World War II, as well as hundreds of medical devices from the 1950s and 1960s that
offered hope with no scientific underpinning.
In addition, how the
public came to engage FDA and its work, especially from the 1970s forward, can
be seen in a number of objects, including protest buttons and placards from the
past two decades.
Artifacts like these
tell the story of how our many laws and regulations came to be, how FDA has
carried them out, and how the public and FDA have engaged each other in the
interest of the public health.
John Swann, Ph.D., is an
Historian at FDA
- See more at:
http://blogs.fda.gov/fdavoice/index.php/2014/05/artifacts-tell-the-story-of-our-culture-and-fdas-history/#sthash.XEiRd40Z.dpuf
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