FDA News Blog @newzblogz.com

These days, those words seem more like a warning label than a simple declaration of a product?s country of origin.

The bad news about products from China just keeps mounting. First, it was poison in the pet food. Then came counterfeit Colgate laced with antifreeze. Now, comes word of toy trains coated in lead paint.

ALTHOUGH THE pet-food recall, which seemed to grow by the day, caused me some consternation as I attempted to make a safe choice in the dog-food aisle, it was the last one that truly hit home. It didn?t involve some cheap, plastic, dollar-store toy.

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She wakes. She sees her mother's smiling face. She has

breakfast - perhaps Cheerios or her reliable mealtime

favorite, cream of chicken soup. She watches a video of the

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When nurse Julie Thao put a spinal drug in Jasmine Gant's arm at St. Mary's Hospital in Madison a year ago, the fatal mistake struck many as a freak event.

But Thao's intravenous delivery of an epidural pain medication was an unusually public example of a quiet but dangerous health care problem: tubing misconnections.

At least 1,200 times in the past nine years, U.S. hospital workers have inadvertently given patients solutions meant to flow through one tube -- an IV, an epidural, a feeding tube, a bladder catheter, a blood line -- into another tube, frequently causing harm and sometimes death. The true tally is much greater.

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Citing Bush administration neglect of the FDA's regulatory duties, columnist Paul Krugman blames late economist Milton Friedman for recent episodes of contaminated food ("Fear of eating: a market failure," May 27).

He erroneously assumes Bush and company are applying the free market philosophy Friedman espoused, which says that forces other than regulation will work to ensure food safety.

One of those forces is civil law, which steps in when personal injury (poisoning) occurs. The other is public demand; we insist on a higher standard than "just don't poison me." A free market will deliver whatever the public demands. But this is no free market.

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But maybe the greed of record labels and the laziness of artists also are causing the death of the CD.

That's an intriguing theory presented by Guggenheim Grotto, an Irish folk-pop band whose CD does what few others do - gives fans something meaty to devour besides just the music.

Guggenheim Grotto's "Waltzing Alone" CD comes in a thick booklet that looks like a mini high-school yearbook. The booklet includes lyrics. And full-page illustrations of lyrics. And explanations from not one, not two, but all three band members on how and why they wrote each song. Of course, the booklet has band photos.

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