Food and Drug Safety
The State of Food Safety
© 2016 The Pew Charitable Trusts PulseNet is a surveillance system that uses molecular “fingerprinting” to identify links between foodborne illnesses across states. The CDC launched PulseNet in 1996. Sandra Eskin directs The Pew Charitable Trusts’ work on food safety. Twenty years ago, four children died and more than 700 people were sickened in a […]
Rethinking the Use of Methadone as a Preferred Treatment for Pain
© Getty Images Director of National Drug Control Policy Michael Botticelli takes part in a discussion on drug abuse at the East End Family Resource Center on October 21, 2015 in Charleston, West Virginia. Cynthia Reilly directs Pew’s prescription drug abuse project. More than 16,000 Americans die each year from prescription opioid overdoses, with a […]
Prescription Databases Weigh Public Health Against Patient Privacy
Kentucky’s “pill problem” and the state’s plan to fix it unfolded before a national gathering of state lawmakers in Washington D.C. Thursday (December 6). As David Hopkins, director of Kentucky’s prescription drug monitoring program, shared the state’s prescription numbers —about 60 million prescriptions in August 2012 alone for a population of about 4.4 million — […]
A Fight Over Food Labels in California
A ballot measure to require labeling of genetically modified foods has brought big money and prominent players to the table. (AP) California’s Proposition 37 started out as one ex-farmer’s low-budget quest to get genetically modified foods labeled at the grocery store. Now, with less than three months until election day, it’s turning into a multimillion […]
States Crack Down on Mental Health Prescriptions
In the past two years, Illinois has done just about everything it could to reduce the amount it spends on prescription drugs for mental health. It has placed restrictions on the availability of 17 medications used to treat depression, psychosis and attention-deficit disorder. Doctors now have to explain to Medicaid why the drugs are necessary […]