The FDA's D Being Short For Death

According Nobel Prize winning physician and scientist, George Hastings, the 5 year delay in introducing the antibiotic drug, Septra, resulted in approximately 80,000 preventable deaths in the United States. It used to take less than 3 years for the FDA to approve a drug (back in the mid-60s) and now it takes close to 10 years and a billion dollars (per drug!!). To say that we need to streamline this process is about as self evident as it gets...................................................................................P.S. The reason that it takes so long for the FDA to approve these drugs (i.e., those drugs in which various members of the FDA don't have a financial stake in) is because the agency has gotten so paranoid about type 2 errors (the act of approving a drug that has costs greater than its benefits) that its actually taken the precautionary principle to idiotic (not to mention, deadly) extremes....And I'm telling you here, if we had had this level of inertia 200 years ago, we'd probably still be breaking sod, breathing in horse manure, and croaking at 40.