This research presents an overview of the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The agency's history, scope of responsibility, powers, and recent actions are reviewed.
Environmental health, as a concept, contains elements of both environmental protection and public health, although the scope of environmental health does not encompass the totality of either environmental protection or public health. A soci ety's food supply is a part of its environment, and it is a part of the societal environment which affects public health. Protection of a society's food supply, thus, is a matter of national welfare. By protecting the food supply, a society attempts to insure that organisms and substances harmful to human life do not reach members of the society through the food chain. In the United States, by the time one sits down to break fast, a "half a dozen agencies of the federal government have dealt with the food."1 One of these six federal agencies is
1M. C. Cummings, Jr., and D. Wise, Democracy Under Pres sure, 7th ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1989), 12.
2 the FDA. This state of affairs, however, was not always the case in the United States.
The Meat Inspection Act and the Food and Drugs Act were both enacted into law in 1906.2 The Meat Inspection Act pro vides for the federal enforcement of sanitary regulations in meat packing facilities, and is administered by the Department of Agriculture. The Food and Drugs Act forbade the manufac ture, sale, or transport of adulterated or fraudulently labeled food and drugs in interstate commerce.3 It was not until 1927, however, that an independent regulatory agency, the FDA, was established to administer the act.4
The Food and Drugs Act of 1906 was replaced by the Pure Food, Drugs, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. This act has been sub sequently amended by the Food Additives Amendment in 1958, and the Kefauver Harris Amendment in 1962. The latter ...