In Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Sinclair illuminates the horrors of the meat packing industry during the early 1900’s. This caused a push for change in the food industry. In 1906 the Food and Drugs Act was signed. For drugs there had to be a label that stated what was in the drug. It prevented the interstate transport of unlawful food and drugs. This law was formed in order to regulate product labeling. It made sure that the food or drug label was not false or misleading. It also prevented food from having any hazardous ingredients in it, such as food or drugs being produced in dirty working conditions. In 1938, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act was passed. This included “cosmetics and medical devices under control, required that drugs be labeled …show more content…
Yet they are only funded $2 billion a year. This sounds like a lot of money for one agency to have, but once you begin thinking of all the things the FDA is supposed to do, this amount is just not enough. The FDA is supposed to review every drug before it goes on the market. They are supposed to check and make sure that the drug does what it is supposed to and does not have any severe side effects, and that any side effect it does have is disclosed. Yet sometimes products go on the market with dangerous side effects, and it takes the FDA years to reveal it to the public. They are also supposed to inspect the factories at which these drugs are made to make sure that they are safe and clean factories. Yet last year there was only enough inspectors to inspect “13 of the 713 Chinese factories that produce medicine for U.S consumers”, despite the rising concern about Chinese drugs and their safety. So there is no way to know how safe and clean the working conditions are of these other seven hundred Chinese factories that these drugs were made in. But with only $2 billion there is no way to employee enough employees to conduct these inspections and investigate every drug thoroughly. Some believe that it is not a lack of funding that prevents the FDA from doing their job, it is …show more content…
Many believe that the FDA has financial reasons for allowing a drug to be on the market. In 2006, a study found that” in 22% of advisory board meetings, more than half the members had direct financial in the companies whose medial products they evaluated or their rivals”. The FDA’s advisory boards should not be able to vote on companies that they have financial ties to. The FDA says they do the best they can to create an unbiased board, but it is difficult to find “top medical experts with no ties” to pharmaceutical companies. Since a number of people have complained about this, Congress decided to make the FDA cut twenty-five percent of the advisory board that has financial ties with the pharmaceutical company being evaluated over the next five years. But what about the other seventy five percent of the board? If a person has a financial tie with a company, they should not be able to vote on it, and if more than fifty percent of the board has a financial tie with a company the drug will get passed just for their financial gain. This causes corruption in the FDA and drugs to get passed to be put on the market with not much research being done on the
Although there had to have been an obligation before to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act. Professor Harvey Washington Wiley wanted to take action and stop the production of the misinterpretation of real medicine. He lead a campaign wanting to end this dilemma, by using propaganda and research he wanted to influence others to take action and react to the lies that were being filled and distributed in bottles of medicine. Even though Wiley presented all of his information, Sinclairs profounding novel was what finally brought the Food and Drug Act to a realization. The Pure Food and Drug Act was a law set up to stop the marketing of ambiguous medicine or medicine that was deteriorated, became hazardous to the people.
It achieved what he was aiming for. I agree with the way he used to try and fix this problem. There might have been other ways to fix it, but they wouldn't have been as effective. Because of this book, The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 were created. After that, the Bureau of Chemistry became the Food and Drug Administration in 1930.
Sinclair also discussed how rotting and diseased meat was processed and treated with chemicals, then labelled incorrectly and sold to the public. Following the release of The Jungle, public outrage spurred the passage of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and the Pure Food and Drug Act, which later led to the formation of the Food and Drug Administration. These acts were two of many Progressive acts passed, including the Hepburn act to strengthen the Interstate Commerce Committee, the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution that gave Congress the power to levy federal income tax, and the Seventeenth Amendment which allowed for the direct election of senators
Right now in the United States of America, there is a monopoly that exists that involves epinephrine auto-injectors. EpiPen is the United States only supplier of these auto-injectors because other brands have suffered setbacks and failures, patent protection laws, and because there are currently no generic versions of EpiPen in the United States (Johnson). This monopoly was not a problem until Mylan bought Meda AB in 2007 (Paton). “Since Mylan bought the rights to EpiPen in 2007, it has raised the price on 15 separate occasions, bringing the current list price to $608 for a two-pack up from about $50 a pen in 2007” (Mole). This has been a price increase of more than 500%, and this shows that Mylan has been using the monopoly to its advantage.
In the early 1900s, food safety was an incredibly unfamiliar and overlooked part of America’s food industry. Written by muckraker Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, was a controversial novel that depicted the harsh living and working conditions of immigrants working in the food industry. After the release of The Jungle, thousands of meat-eating Americans were horrified at what had been happening in factories. Disgusting yet accurate details presented in The Jungle were the basis for the creation of laws to stop food production from becoming so unsanitary.
The Food and Drug Administration founded in 1848 by the work of Lewis Caleb Beck, the FDA has grown in stature and responsibility to take charge of research, development, and regulation of food and drugs. Men, like Harvey Wiley, helped to oversee the administration of effective consumer protection policies, which led to the enacting of the Pure Food and Drug Act. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was the first legislation in the country that sought to regulate pharmaceuticals and food products by requiring truth-in-labeling on products, creating inspectors of the drug and food manufacturing process, and creating a list of 10 dangerous drugs that had to be labeled at all times. It ultimately came about during the
That same day, The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was created. This act required the makers of prepared food and medicine to host government inspection as well. Overall, these acts have now been a reassurance to the public that meat and other things are in good
One of the most famous muckrakers that protested against the problems in food and health was, Upton Sinclair. He wrote a very famous book, “The Jungle”, that exposed the corruption and awful living conditions of the stockyards workers and the unclean handling of spoiled meat, and unsanitary conditions of the meat. They mixed rotten meat with raw meat and without any sanitary instrument. His book was an inspirational piece that drew public 's attention of the huge issue of unsanitary meat processing plants. When the people were complaining about the issue, T. Roosevelt, signed the Pure Food and Drug Act that prevented the manufacture, sale or transportation of misbranded or poisonous or adulterated foods, drugs, liquors and medicines, also it regulated the traffic.
Upton Sinclair portrays the economic tension in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through his novel “The Jungle”. He used the story of a Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus, to show the harsh situation that immigrants had to face in the United States, the unsanitary and unsafe working conditions in the meatpacking plants, as well as the tension between the capitalism and socialism in the United States during the early 1900s. In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, there were massive immigrants move into the United States, and most of them were from Europe. The protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, like many other immigrants, have the “America Dream” which they believe America is heaven to them, where they can
In “ The Jungle”, the author Upton Sinclair states that “ I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach”. This means that Sinclair wanted to muckrake the Meat Packing Industry to seek attention for the workers, but instead food became a bigger concern. The characters Jurgis, Ona, and Marija with fellow family members are Lithuanian immigrants who came to PackingTown in hope for a better future, however they came to realize that the whole town is run by capitalist. Although Sinclair intentionally uses metaphors and similes to depict the characters struggle in the horrible living and working conditions in Packingtown, his purpose is undermined and overlooked by his use of realism to depict the food process.
Revealing the harsh treatment of meatpacking workers and showing the reality of the disgusting conditions found in butchery shops to the public, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle became an enduring classic by American readers throughout the early twentieth century the prompted the later creation of the Federal Drug Administration. In the early 1900s, America was explosively transitioning from an agricultural society to a thriving manufacturing-based nation. As production demand in factories grew throughout the country, the work force needed to run those factories also expanded. A new type of demanding and dangerous work became prevalent throughout the nation, as immigrants coming into the “Land of Opportunity” found themselves desperate
In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair explains how horrible working conditions were for people in the meatpacking industry. Have you ever wondered what effect Upton Sinclair had on American industry? The Jungle is about the poor working conditions and the very poor sanitation in 1906. We will also be talking about the backstory behind Upton Sinclair. Upton Sinclair discovered how bad working areas were.
Every citizen in the United States has individual rights protected by the Constitution. This protection also includes businesses that have gone through the legal process to become a legal entity ; more commonly known as becoming a corporation. Many times these individual rights, protected by the Constitution, conflict with the common good and as history shows, the courts consistently side with the common good when faced with a case that pits these two against each other. Big Pharma are corporations exercising their individual rights to market, and sell their product to consumers. In the process, the common good is suffering.
Don’t even get me started on the American food industry! The american food industry is one of the only food industries in the whole wide world that favors money over the health of its citizens. The food that most Americans eat is processed crap, if you can even call it food! How many of you have eaten popcorn, chips, candy, or crackers in the last week? The amount of chemicals in the food we eat as a country on a daily basis is freaking ridiculous.
Many new companies to enter the market without burden of costly tasks such as research and development, clinical trials and manufacturing of drugs. Moreover, patent expiry is one of the reasons which is offering opportunities for lower cost generic manufacturer in terms of greater market access. Additionally, the government has increased their focus on healthcare cost cutting. It is creating pressure on the authority to allow early introduction of low-cost drugs in the