The Food and Drug Administration protects the public health, or at least that is what the regulatory agency is supposed to do. Based on the agency’s track record, however, I have to wonder sometimes whether it really understand its mission. When small amounts of benzene, a known cancer-causing chemical, were found in some soft drinks 16 years ago, the FDA never told the public. That’s because the beverage industry told the regulatory agency it would handle the problem, and the FDA apparently believed that the problem was solved. But, benzene has turned up again. The FDA has found levels of benzene in soft drinks higher than what it found in 1990, and two to four times higher than what’s considered safe for drinking water. How can this be since the problem was supposed to have been handled years ago?

Of the 60 or so varieties of sodas, sports drinks, juice drinks and bottled waters that the FDA has tested so far, benzene levels have ranged from two and three parts per billion to more than 10-20 parts per billion. The Environmental Protection Agency’s safety standard for benzene in drinking water is five parts per billion. If it exceeds that, authorities are required to notify the public. The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit, nonpartisan scientific research group, and health safety watchdog organization, said the FDA should inform the public, particularly because so many soft drinks are marketed to children. Jane Houlihan, vice president for research at EWG, which studies toxic chemicals, observed:

Most people would prefer there are no known human carcinogens in what they drink. This is a case where industry agreed to get it out of the products, and all the evidence says they didn’t.

When benzene first turned up, FDA officials met with representatives of the beverage industry who “expressed their concern about the presence of benzene traces in their products and the potential for adverse publicity associated with this problem,” according to an internal FDA memo from 1990. The FDA should have done its job and had it done so, the problem – one that the beverage industry said it would handle – would not be with us today. I am afraid that the FDA has not learned to date that the dog is supposed to wag the tail and that it shouldn’t work the other way around. Somebody should let the agency know that it is the regulatory body and that it should do its job. We have seen far too much evidence of how the FDA depends on those companies it is supposed to regulate.

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