Meridia Newsroom

Public Citizen And The Center For Science In The Public Interest Have Sued The FDA Over The Plan To Revise Rules On Food- Health Claims

Public Citizen also says McClellan failed to protect people from products linked to heart attacks and deaths, such as the ephedra weight-loss aid made by Metabolife International Inc. and Abbott Laboratories' Meridia diet pill. Still, McClellan takes the time to listen to his critics. Before being sworn in as commissioner, he spent hours with Public Citizen's Wolfe, discussing the state of the agency.

Wolfe said he told McClellan, ```You have a tough act to follow,'' referring to David Kessler, who was appointed by President George H.W. Bush to head the FDA in 1990. By the time Kessler resigned in 1997, he had banned silicone breast implants and had tried unsuccessfully to regulate tobacco. The FDA commissioner's post was vacant from the time that Jane Henney, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, left the job in January 2001 until McClellan took over.

McClellan hasn't been shy about urging individuals to take a stronger hand in looking after their own health, advice he tries to follow himself by going for a run or taking his 5-year-old twin daughters out
to play. Making Voice Heard

His office has issued more than 120 press releases this year -- three times as many as Henney did in 2000, her last full year in office. He has appeared at scores of medical meetings, some investor conferences and at least one radio call-in show. In September, McClellan used his first international speech, in Mexico, to call on other countries to pay higher prices for medicines. Countries such as Canada and Japan set their prices so low that the U.S. and poorer nations such as Poland end up footing most of the bill for pharmaceutical research, he said.

The FDA has also stepped up enforcement actions against companies that supply U.S. consumers with Canadian medicines, sending warning letters to firms such as CanaRx Services Inc., then issuing press releases about these actions. Drugmakers have struggled in recent years to bring new medicines to market to make up for sales lost to generic competition for some of the industry's biggest products. The Standard & Poor's 500 Pharmaceutical Index has fallen about 3.4 percent this year, while the S&P 500 Index rose 19 percent.