[HN Gopher] A Woman Who Stood Between America and a Generation o... ___________________________________________________________________ A Woman Who Stood Between America and a Generation of 'Thalidomide Babies' Author : dcminter Score : 23 points Date : 2021-02-06 19:51 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com) | hprotagonist wrote: | This explains about everything you need to know about the ethos | of the FDA. It's baked in at a really foundational level. | | As a biomedical person, i find the FDAs policies and procedures | eminently sensible, perhaps especially when they chafe, and this | is why. | | I do not envy them their jobs even the littlest bit, but I'm glad | they're around. | k__ wrote: | How come, the US has an opiate crisis? | meekrohprocess wrote: | Many American regulatory institutions have crumbled in the | past few decades, the FAA being a particularly jarring | example. | | In some cases it seems like peoples' trust in those | regulators may be fueled by nostalgia, but the FDA does seem | like one of the few agencies that has retained some measure | of independence. | | Looking at what has happened in this nation's other | industries and institutions, only one crippling decades-long | medical crisis doesn't seem all that bad. | bordercases wrote: | That's not an explanation for why the FDA has failed to | address the regulatory aspects of the opioid crisis, but an | argument for why we should discount or ignore that failure. | At the very least - non sequitur. | formerly_proven wrote: | A while ago I posed a similar question and the | answers/downvotes made it clear to me why; Americans have a | broken model of pain management. Americans think that opiates | are necessary to manage the pain from most surgeries, back | pain, headaches etc., so, they get opiates to do that, with | the _obvious_ and _foreseeable_ catastrophic consequences. | every wrote: | Regulatory capture can be a significant factor: | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture | ficklepickle wrote: | While this is great and all, the comments indicate that tons of | doses circulated the USA as samples. There are two people in the | comments claiming to be survivors from these samples. | | If this is true, then the article is incorrect. It appears that | Americans were just denied compensation because the drug wasn't | approved. | | I'm sure the harm would have been much greater had the FDA | approved the medication. But it seems unfair to say they were no | victims in the USA. | xiphias2 wrote: | The article reports that there were victims. Are we reading the | same article? | dcminter wrote: | The article itself states that samples were distributed and | that "In the U.S., 17 cases of congenital deformities were | reported" ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-02-06 23:00 UTC)