Quote:
Originally Posted by newmum35  No, they should have only removed the GMO product and left the other (safer) product on the market that had not caused this problems.. did they realize this was a problem with just the newer GMO product, and if not how long did it take for them to find that out? I haven't followed the story so I have no idea if this is even still on the market and if so at what year it was re introduced (the non gmo product of course)
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For a surpisingly readable bulletin-style history of the outbreak, see
MMWRs from 1989 November
17,
24, and
December 8 and 1990
January 12,
February 16,
May 18, and
August 31.
It's pretty clear that nobody knew what was actually occurring but that all of a sudden, there were a whole lot of cases of a very unusual illness with only one thing tying them together. The first connection to a single manufacturer was
published 1990 July 11. (I don't know what
JAMA's publication cycle was like back then.) From the CDC authors' conclusion, "timely identification [of the real problem] may ... facilitate the return of uncontaminated tryptophan to market."
One thing perhaps worth noting is that at the (pre-DSHEA) time, it had been technically illegal to market amino acid "supplements" in the U.S. since 1973 in any event, which conceivably could have conditioned the FDA response. (Single-ingredient l-tryptophan had been available only by prescription in Canada since 1985.) DSHEA was enacted in 1994, and as such, l-tryptophan almost certainly could have been marketed at that time if reasonably expected to be safe
by the manufacturer. FDA import alert 54-04 on the stuff was officially canceled in 2005 May. It seems to have started to show back up as a consumer product around 2007.
The question seems to be whether vaccines get a regulatory "free pass" as compared with supplements. I don't think the story of the l-tryptophan recall really serves to demonstrate this proposition. The supplement market was then, and is now, practically unsupervised--if anything, there's less nominal regulation nowadays. No matter how potentially or intrinsically dangerous one considers vaccines to be, I think it's hard to argue that the products themselves aren't subject to far more regular scrutiny.
I realize this is the smallest of C&A's points, the greater ones being that by comparison, nobody is trying to bully anyone into using supplements (with which I agree) and that "if you get sick from a supplement, you can stop taking it and usually your health will return shortly.... this is not the same for most vaccine reactions" (which I think is needlessly giving supplements a similar "free pass"), but this one bit has been clanging around my noggin.
