Less than half of U.S. adults give positive marks to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for ensuring the safety of food eaten in the United States and ensuring the safety and efficacy of new prescription drugs. Only 48 percent rated the FDA positive on food, and 47 percent rated the agency positive on the safety and efficacy of new drugs, according to a Harris Interactive/HealthDay Poll. The news for the agency isn’t all bad. The findings actually reflect an improvement since a similar survey conducted a year ago.

 

Last year, the public gave the FDA its lowest rating in five years for ensuring the safety and efficacy of new prescription drugs (35 percent positive/58 percent negative). According to Humphrey Taylor, chairman of The Harris Poll, “Perceptions of drug safety have gone up and down. As stories break about drug problems—and Vioxx comes to mind—those numbers change,” he says. “We seem to have recovered from the low figures of last year.”

 

In the area of managing drug recalls, the most recent poll gave the FDA a 53 percent positive rating, up from 39 percent a year ago. But the agency scored poorly in critical areas such as ensuring the safety of imported food (56 percent negative), ensuring the safety of drugs (52 percent negative), and on getting new drugs to the market more quickly (54 percent negative).

 

The findings come as Margaret Hamburg readies to take the reins of the agency as the new FDA commissioner. According to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, food safety has not improved in the past three years. Approximately 76 million people in the U.S. suffer from food borne illnesses each year, of which 300,000 are hospitalized and 5,000 die. The White House notes that the average number of outbreaks attributed to produce and other foods average 350 per year, compared to only 100 per year in the early 1990’s. The FDA currently has the resources to inspect only about 7,000 of the 150,000 food processing plants and warehouses each year.

 

“Every time you get a food recall, you get a huge blip in public opinion,” says The Harris Poll’s Taylor. “Those kinds of stories on food safety and drug safety really do have a big impact.”

 

The poll did fine that food recalls are not always clear to the public. Many people remember the 2009 recall of peanut products (90 percent), and the 2006 recall of spinach (63 percent), however, more than half (56 percent) remember a recall of tomatoes in 2008. Tomatoes were under investigation in this outbreak, but were never officially recalled. The outbreak turned out to be due to jalapeño peppers, and only a third (34 percent) of adults remembers this incident.

 

Harris Interactive conducted the survey online within the United States between April 13 and 15, 2009 among a national cross section of 2,495 adults age 18 and over. Figures for age, gender, race/ethnicity, education, income and region were weighted where necessary to align with population proportions. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents' propensity to be online.