FDA has new screening process.

One of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s primary responsibilities is to monitor FDA-regulated health products imported through American mail facilities. According to their official blog, the goal is to detect unsafe, counterfeit, and unapproved products. Of course such products are ubiquitous in the fitness industry.

And the FDA has an increasingly difficult assignment. The sheer volume of imports and the sophistication of fraud means that more and more contraband is getting through. In response, they are expanding personell and adopting new technology.

Last year, they increased the number of full-time investigators from 8 to 22, which should quadruple the number of packages they can examine.

In addition, they will implement new technology. The FDA’s current analytical process requires sending samples to an FDA laboratory for analysis. Recently though, they have been testing with ion mobility spectrometers. These are similar to airport security devices. They can compare the chemical signature of the unknown substance against chemical signatures of known compounds in less than 30 seconds.

According to the FDA:

“For the pilot testing, the device was loaded with a custom-built library of pharmaceutical compounds to test whether products marketed for weight loss and sexual enhancement contained undeclared drug compounds such as sibutramine, phenolphthalein and sildenafil. These compounds have significant safety concerns and are often counterfeited; and are commonly found within packages coming into the IMFs. When criminals secretly spike products with these compounds, consumers do not know that they are at higher risk of harm from the products.”

An alarming 65 percent of screened samples were flagged for the presence of undeclared pharmaceuticals. These results were confirmed in FDA laboratories, proving the reliability of these screeners.

It will take time and money for them to become standard equipment at screening facilities, but once that happens, the ‘wild-west’ character of the supplement industry could take a big hit.

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