The FDA is responsible for ensuring the safety of foods, drugs, medical devices, cosmetics, and a variety of other products. These products account for 25 cents of every dollar US consumers spend. Under the authority of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, FDA is responsible for ensuring that these products are safe, accurately labelled, and in the case of drugs and medical devices, effective. FDA's tasks include: enforcement, pre-market product evaluation and approval, post-market surveillance and investigations, publishing of regulations, conducting and monitoring of research, public education, and regulating products and processes to prevent hazards to human health. Contents: Preface; Food and Drug Administration: Selected Funding Data; Food and Drug Administration: Selected Funding and Policy Issues; US European Agricultural Trade: Food and Biotechnology Issues; Food and Drug Administration: Selected Funding and Policy Issues; Food and Drug Administration Modernisation Act of 1997 -- The Provisions; Index.

This timely volume illustrates how and why the fight against quackery in modern America has largely failed, laying the blame on an unlikely confluence of scientific advances, regulatory reforms, changes in the medical profession, and the politics of consumption. Throughout the 20th century, anti-quackery crusaders investigated, exposed, and attempted to regulate allegedly fraudulent therapeutic approaches to health and healing under the banner of consumer protection and a commitment to medical science. Quack Medicine: A History of Combating Health Fraud in Twentieth-Century America reveals how efforts to establish an exact border between quackery and legitimate therapeutic practices and medications have largely failed, and details the reasons for this failure. Digging beneath the surface, the book uncovers the history of allegedly fraudulent therapies including pain medications, obesity and asthma cures, gastrointestinal remedies, virility treatments, and panaceas for diseases such as arthritis, asthma, diabetes, and HIV/AIDS. It shows how efforts to combat alleged medical quackery have been connected to broader debates among medical professionals, scientists, legislators, businesses, and consumers, and it exposes the competing professional, economic, and political priorities that have encouraged the drawing of arbitrary, vaguely defined boundaries between good medicine and "quack medicine."