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  Awards Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Ctr. Boston Medical Center Boston University Brigham and Women's Hospital Broad Institute Cambridge Health Alliance Caritas St. Elizabeth's Medical Ctr. Children's Hospital Boston Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Grants Harvard University Joslin Diabetes Center Lahey Clinic Mass. General Hospital Mass. Health Law McLean Hospital MIT New England Baptist Hospital Personnel Moves Public Health Research Short White Coat Tufts-New England Medical Center Tufts University UMass Memorial Medical Center University of Massachusetts VA Medical Centers    A Healthy Blog Running A Hospital Nature Network Boston SciBos - Corie Lok's blog Kevin, M.D. Blog, MD Dr. Flea's blog Nurse at small Your Child's Health Blog Healthy Children blog WBUR's CommonHealth Other Globe Blogs
Elizabeth Cooney is a health reporter for the Worcester Telegram &
Gazette.
Boston Globe Health and Science staff:
Scott Allen Alice Dembner Carey Goldberg Liz Kowalczyk Stephen Smith Colin Nickerson Beth Daley Karen Weintraub, Deputy Health and Science Editor, and Gideon Gil, Health and Science Editor. Short White Coat blogger Ishani Ganguli  |
« Drug poisoning likely claimed Anna Nicole Smith's life | Main | Creating robots that slink and squirm » Tuesday, March 27, 2007Today's Globe: food inspections, cholesterol drug, biotech generics, FDA balance, the doctor and deathLocal food inspection departments are dangerously understaffed and underfunded, with the state Department of Public Health doing little to solve a problem that specialists say could have catastrophic consequences, according to a report released yesterday by state Auditor A. Joseph DeNucci. The hot new strategy of trying to prevent heart disease by raising good cholesterol had more setbacks yesterday as new studies indicated that experimental drugs didn't work and also had safety problems. A top drug regulator told lawmakers yesterday it could be a decade or more before science is available to safely approve generic versions of biotech drugs in the way the agency approves knockoffs of traditional drugs. The FDA needs to find a balance between expeditious approval of drugs or devices and the kind of rigorous scrutiny that will uncover -- preferably before approval -- the dangerous side effects of many new medications, a Globe editorial says. As a surgeon, Pauline W. Chen deals with the critically ill. But it wasn't until she started writing about it that she learned how to deal with the emotions of it. Posted by Elizabeth Cooney at 06:20 AM
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