Calls for oversight grow as U.S. meningitis scare widens
Oct-13-2012

Pressure mounted for greater regulation of a little known corner of the pharmaceuticals industry in response to a meningitis scare that widened to 11 states on Wednesday with the first case confirmed in Idaho.
Since the September 25 recall of three lots of a steroid produced by a Massachusetts company, 138 people have contracted meningitis and 12 have died, according to the latest tally from the Centers of Disease Control and Idaho on Wednesday.
The Idaho case was the first discovered in the western United States. The hardest hit state is Tennessee with 44 people sickened with the rare disease.
The number of cases has grown rapidly as health practitioners contacted some 13,000 people around the country who received injections from a potentially tainted supply of steroid medication shipped to 23 states.
Congress came under pressure to close what critics see as a loophole in regulation that left the company linked to the tainted product largely exempt from federal regulation.
"We urge Congress to give FDA (the Food and Drug Administration) the authority it needs to assure these kinds of outbreaks do not happen again," said an official of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who declined to be identified because of ongoing investigations.

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