A new report claims that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration secretly allowed substandard foreign factories with dangerous manufacturing issues to ship hundreds of medications to the United States despite being officially banned by the agency.
In June, ProPublica reported that a group of individuals inside the Food and Drug Administration exempted drugs shipped to the U.S. from foreign factories despite the agency banning imports from certain factories due to contamination and other issues. The outlet noted that pills and other medications exempted from the bans were distributed to Americans and claimed that the agency did not regularly test the drugs for quality issues or track the medications to determine whether the medications were causing harm.
According to ProPublica, Janet Woodcock, a former Food and Drug Administration employee, told the outlet, “We felt we didn’t have to make it a public thing.”
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In a new report, ProPublica claimed that the Food and Drug Administration did not adequately monitor various reports filed by medical providers and other individuals who warned that some drugs had a bad odor, residue, or abnormal taste. The outlet claimed that the government agency also did not adequately monitor reports of patients experiencing abnormal health issues potentially related to certain medications.
According to ProPublica, the Food and Drug Administration largely withheld the information regarding the medication import ban exemptions from the American public and has not shared a list of medications that the U.S. government allowed into the country from foreign factories banned by the agency. However, ProPublica released a list of the drugs and ingredients that the outlet determined were exempted from import bans since 2013. The list also reveals the manufacturing companies responsible for the production of the medications.
ProPublica reported that the news outlet found that the Food and Drug Administration exempted over 150 medications and ingredients from import bans. While the majority of the exempted products came from India, ProPublica reported that a Chinese factory and a Hungarian factory were also exempted by the federal agency.
