Protecting America's Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation
Protecting America's Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation by Philip J. Hilts is a nonfiction work that traces history and social structures.
Work Information
Protecting America's Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation remains a work that continues to attract readers.
Protecting America's Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation is an award-winning work by Philip J. Hilts that can be read through the lens of history and society.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Knopf
- Published
- 2003-03-25
- Pages
- 416 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 16.54 x 3.38 x 24.13 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780375404665
- ISBN-10
- 037540466X
- Price
- 13573 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Politics & Social Sciences/Politics & Government/Public Affairs & Policy/Public Affairs & Administration
Emerging out of the era of the robber barons and Theodore Roosevelt’s desire to “civilize capitalism,” the Food and Drug Administration was created to stop the trade in adulterated meats and quack drugs. In the almost one hundred years since, it has evolved from a squad of eleven inspectors dogging dishonest tradesmen into America’s most important regulatory agency, keeping tabs on the products of about 95,000 businesses and more than $1 trillion worth of goods annually. This book shows how the agency combats self-serving political and industrial interests and protects Americans from hazardous medicines, medical devices, and foodstuffs while enforcing rigorous scientific standards. Hilts takes us back to the FDA’s beginnings, when it confronted businesses that acknowledged no limitations on what could be brought to market or on the claims they could make for a product. With the coming of the FDA, our government, for the first time, was able to force the removal of toxic elixirs from the shelves and to insist on accurate labeling. We see the subsequent fights the FDA waged, and won, for mandatory testing, and against such conservatives as—in our own time—Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, who tried to curtail regulation. We see how the FDA protected the American consumer from thalidomide and other lethal pharmaceuticals, how it took on the tobacco industry, and how it stumbled in confronting the deadly mysteries of AIDS. And we are given, as well, a litany of extraordinary corporate excesses that the FDA has exposed and successfully battled. Protecting America’s Health shows society adapting to both the burgeoning of science and technology and the ascendancy of the capitalist market. It makes startlingly clear the essential role the FDA has played in maintaining and protecting the quality of life—and health—to which the American public has long been accustomed.
Philip J. Hilts has written about medicine for the Washington Post and the New York Times (since 1989). He is the author of Smokescreen: The Truth Behind the Tobacco Industry Cover-Up , Memory’s Ghost: The Nature of Memory and The Strange Tale of Mr. M., and Scientific Temperaments: Three Lives in Contemporary Science , a finalist for the National Book Award. He and his wife live in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Reviews
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米国食品医薬品局（ＦＤA）の政治と歴史を統括
本書はＦＤＡの歴史を成り立ちから語った、一種の近代史ものです。 粗悪な食品や、効き目のほとんどない薬品が平然と売られていたのは そんな昔の話ではないのです。 ＦＤＡという行政機関がアメリカの政治の中で翻弄される様子が 詳しく書かれています。 どちらかというとＦＤＡに好意的に書かれていますが。 後半、アメリカが新薬の承認がヨーロッパに比べて遅いのは ＦＤＡのせいではないかという批判についての論争を 取り上げています。 客観的なデータを挙げて、かならずしもそうではないことを証明しています。 昨今、新薬は承認されても、されなくても世間の強い注目を集めます。 政治的な意見だけに左右されない、冷静な分析は貴重です。
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Fantastic book!
Fantastic book! The content is very informative from a historical aspect and very entertaining from a reader's aspect. As an aspiring pharmacist, I particularly liked the content. There are numerous parallels between the history of the FDA and the Obamacare legislation currently going on. Great read for anyone. As a disclaimer, this is a very liberal book. Conservatives will either hate it and stop reading or find themselves a little more liberal by the end of it.
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Scarily informative
Easy to read. Frighteningly informative. Graphic insight into the workings of federal government in the USA, the constraints and controls behind the American federal system , and yet most of it still within living memory. Consciousness raising. Now want to read comparative histories of our own and other European systems. Definiately Recommend
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Worth the time!
If my professor had assigned readings from it instead of last minute saying to just read the entire thing... I would have gotten more out of it, but it is still an extremely enlightening book! I'm actually glad I have it in my collection and intend to re read it when I can enjoy it more!
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Plus Ca Change
Hilts' readable book is the best introduction I know to the history and politics of FDA regulation. That history, as Hilts retells it, is a spiral. Clearly, there have been significant regulatory innovations since the days of T.R., and Hilts takes us through the key turning points. At the same time, the same core arguments about the virtues of regulation and the virtues of free markets recur. Specialists will find some of the retelling oversimplified, and Hilts' own position (some will say "bias") is always clear. Nonetheless, there is no better first immersion into these issues, a terrific foundation for more nuanced analysis.
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Very Informative
This book contains iformation about how the FDA came to be from the days of one man working to prove preservatives unsafe to what it is today. Although the author seems a little biased at times, he definitely has his own political ideas, the book is easy to read and very interesting.