Ruth Lamb The first federal food and drug law prohibiting adulteration and misbranding of foods and drugs moving in interstate commerce was the revolutionary 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act, a popular law often called the “Wiley Act” in tribute to the Chief Chemist, Harvey Washington Wiley, who played a key role in its passage. Over the next two decades, however, the law had become outdated in many ways, and the FDA was being blamed in the press for not protecting consumers from dangerous and misleading products. Ruth Lamb was FDA’s first Chief Educational Officer and one of her first tasks was t
Ruth Lamb The first federal food and drug law prohibiting adulteration and misbranding of foods and drugs moving in interstate commerce was the revolutionary 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act, a popular law often called the “Wiley Act” in tribute to the Chief Chemist, Harvey Washington Wiley, who played a key role in its passage. Over the next two decades, however, the law had become outdated in many ways, and the FDA was being blamed in the press for not protecting consumers from dangerous and misleading products. Ruth Lamb was FDA’s first Chief Educational Officer and one of her first tasks was to help assemble an exhibit of problem products that the Wiley Act did not allow the agency to take action against — radium waters, for example, and quack medical devices, just to name a few. When a famous visitor, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited the exhibit, a reporter accompanying her dubbed the exhibit “an American Chamber of Horrors” and the name stuck. A couple of years later, Lamb published a book by the same name, which became an important educational tool to help people understand why the Wiley Act could not be sufficiently amended, and instead, needed to be replaced. Her book became an important contribution to the new field of literature on consumer protection that was critical to getting the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act enacted. The law itself was as revolutionary as the 1906 statute in many ways by providing FDA with important new authorities and tools to assure the integrity of the food supply, the safety of new drugs, the safety of cosmetics, colors, and devices. Enforcement actions were enhanced with the ability to seek and enforce legal injunctions rather than resort to multiple seizures of violative products. It is this law, with its hundreds of amendments, that FDA still operates under today.
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Keywords: act, chamber, drugs, food, horrors, pure
