Toxins in Nutrition Supplements Still Escape FDA Oversight

Good news for extremist libertarians & anarchists - the federal government lacks power to protect us from being poisoned by companies making big profits from products called nutritional supplements.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2014/04/02/toxins-in-nutrition-supplements-still-escape-fda-oversight/

By Dina Fine Maron | April 2, 2014

When young and middle-aged adults started showing up at the hospital with liver failure last spring, doctors in Hawaii struggled to find the thread that connected the patients. They found it in the form of a popular sports supplement, OxyElite Pro.

The supplement was linked last May to severe hepatitis, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, tasked with removing such dangerous substances from store shelves, did not learn of the cases until four months later. By February, months after the product was voluntarily taken off the market, there were 97 cases linked back to the supplement, including one death and three liver transplants.

These and other statistics from a new report highlight continued weaknesses in the U.S. system’s ability to protect consumers from OxyElite Pro and other untested supplements. Consumers are continually being put at risk of consuming supplements tainted with harmful substances, Pieter Cohen, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, writes in the April 3 New England Journal of Medicine. About half of all U.S. adults take dietary supplements, meaning that literally millions of people could be at risk.

OxyElite Pro was far from the first such problematic incident. Even five years ago the U.S. Government Accountability Office highlighted serious supplement oversight issues, warning that FDA does not have enough authority to ensure the products are safe.

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The prospects for any significant immediate change, however, seem slim, given that past reform efforts have all but flatlined. Sen. Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) has repeatedly tried to pass a bill that would require supplement manufactures to register their products and to provide more safety information, but it languished in 2011. An effort to attach provisions of the bill to other legislation as an amendment last year also proved unsuccessful. The bill was then reintroduced this session with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.) as its cosponsor, although no one expects the legislation to move. There is also no companion legislation in the House.

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