“President Barack Obama has said the US food safety system is a “public health hazard” and in need of an overhaul. He sounded the warning during his weekly radio and video address, as he appointed a new head of the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA). New York Health Commissioner Margaret Hamburg has been named for the post.”

That’s from a BBC report about Obama’s new health czar.

 Comment:

Hat-tip to Sunni Maravillosa for the link. As she points out, calling the FDA “a public health hazard” has a certain libertarian appeal until you read on and find out that what Obama has in mind is an expansion of the funding (hasn’t he heard we’re in a financial meltdown?), an overhaul of the system (read, more bureaucracy), and coordination throughout (read, more centralization).

Here’s the money part:

“The president also announced he was creating a working group to co-ordinate food safety laws throughout government and advise him on how to update the legislation, which he said had not been touched since it was drafted a century ago.”

And who’s the new healthocrat? A bioterrorism expert, who was an assistant health secretary under President Bill Clinton….

We always knew that an Obama presidency would be Clinton – Episode III…

Please underline in your little diaries: bioterrorism, New York, and coordinate through out government.

Now, I know Ms. Hamburg has a very impressive resume (Harvard MD, neuroscience research at Rockefeller University and neuropharmacology research at the National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, MD, as well as AIDS research at NIH). She also has an interesting personal profile (bi-racial background). But the fact that she “initiated the nation’s first public-health bio-terrorism defense program” isn’t simply interesting to me – it’s disturbing.  I thought we were going to be ratcheting down the war-like posture with Obama. Why does the top health official in the country have to be someone intimately linked to the defense/intelligence complex?

What pressures would that put on her day-to-day policy recommendations? What is this preparing us for? I don’t know. I just worry about it.

Also this part from the NIH’s rather gushing biography:

“Hamburg sent healthcare workers to patients’ homes to help manage their drug regimen, and between 1992 and 1997, the TB rate for New York City fell by 46 percent, and by 86 percent for the most resistant strains…”

Those results sound good, but “help manage their drug regimen” doesn’t sound so good to me.  What if someone didn’t want to take the drug prescribed? Are they forced to?

More digging needed.