A Year of Significant Progress in Public Health
From: FDA | FDA Voice
By: Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D.
A new year offers both an opportunity to look forward and an opportunity to reflect on the achievements of the previous year. And, in 2014, FDA’s accomplishments were substantial, touching on many of the agency’s broad responsibilities to protect and promote the public health.
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Tobacco Control: There are few areas that have as profound an impact on public health as tobacco products, which is why, five years ago, Congress gave FDA the responsibility to oversee the manufacture, marketing, distribution, and sale of tobacco products.
Over the past year, we worked with state authorities to conduct more than 124,000 inspections of retailers to enforce the ban on the sale of tobacco products to children. We unveiled the first of its kind national public education campaign—The Real Cost—to reduce youth smoking. And we took the first steps towards extending the agency’s tobacco product authority over additional products such as electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), cigars, pipe tobacco, nicotine gels, waterpipe (hookah) tobacco, and dissolvables not already subject to such authority through our proposed “Deeming Rule.” In addition, as part of ongoing work on product review decisions, eleven tobacco products that were allowed to enter the market during a provisional period established by the Tobacco Control Act were found “not substantially equivalent” to a predicate tobacco product. As a result of this finding, these products can no longer be sold or distributed in interstate commerce or imported into the United States.
