FDA Fails Again--Now Tainted Syringes

First tainted peanuts, now this: the AP reports that "For months, prosecutors say, technicians in the gloom of a run-down North Carolina plant prepared life-sustaining syringes and shipped them before ensuring they were sterile" and "investigators believe a rush to maximize profits led Dushyant Patel's AM2PAT Inc. to produce heparin and saline syringes that killed five people and sickened hundreds of others, some resulting in spinal meningitis and permanent brain damage." Ned Feder, a staff scientist at the Washington-based nonprofit Project On Government Oversight said that the peanut case and this one "can both be traced back to the fact that the FDA doesn't have the manpower to do the policing it needs to do."