The Sarbanes-Oxley Act came into force in 2002 and introduced major changes to the regulation of financial practice and corporate governance following scandals like the collapse of Enron. It is mandatory and all organizations - large and small - must comply. It has raised the bar for public companies, and failure to comply can result in harsh penalties. A key to compliance with this law is to implement an accounting system that offers an extensive audit trail, including extensive drill-down and drill around capabilities. Critics have argued that the Act has damaged American competitiveness and made it less attractive for foreign companies to list in the American markets, driving initial public offerings abroad. It has also been criticized for increasing the cost for American companies without any significant benefit.

Could the DC Circuit which held that the Sarbanes-Oxley accounting board didn't infringe on constitutional separation of powers rules have been sending a signal to Congress to fix the law? That's what law professor Larry Ribstein thinks might have been going on. [T]he DC Circuit figured that by upholding SOX with a strong dissent, it might be sending a message to Congress to amend to eliminate the problem. The court thereby avoids the chaos that would have ensued under the alternative holding of declaring the PCAOB unconstitutional. Because SOX lacks a severability clause, the effect of that would be to invalidate all of SOX and throw the whole thing back to Congress. That's right. With out a severability clause, Sarbanes-Oxley might be completely struck down by a court finding fault with even a minor part of the law. As we explained earlier this week, the creation of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board may be in trouble if the issue reaches the court, which could put the who

During the recent subprime crisis in the highly interconnected banking and financial services in the US, banks did not seem to know one anothers appetite for risk. They (and other investors) also do not seem to have been able to rely on auditors and rating agencies of counterparties to provide an objective measure of the latters financial position. This is surprising in a post-Sarbanes-Oxley world, where almost all information and controls are supposed to be monitored. Some years ago, as the CFO of an entity that was listed on NYSE, I was exposed to the full force of the Sarbanes-Oxleys law, or SOX. For a period of nearly 12 months, teams of auditors explored the innards of business at our offices in Montreal and New Jersey, documenting every step of our processes and ensuring that whenever there was the likelihood of a control weakness, this was patched up, and furthermore ascertaining if we were following these processes. Little credence seemed to be placed merely on the views of s

The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy has released a white paper calling for stronger criminal penalties for those violating OSHA regulations. Author David M. Uhlmann, a former chief of the Environmental Crimes Section of the U.S. Department of Justice and now the Jeffrey F. Liss Professor from Practice and director of the Environmental Law and Policy Program at the University of Michigan Law School, says in the paper that with nearly 6,000 workers killed on the job annually,

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday allowed XDx Inc. to sell a test for heart-transplant patients. The drug will save the transplant patients from repeated biopsies to check if their bodies are rejecting the new organ. Currently, transplant patients have to get tissue samples from the heart checked to look for signs if their body is rejecting the organ. Such procedures can be hard to perform and risky for the patient. The new non-invasive test will save them from this ordeal.The test was used by some laboratories previously but XDx officials said the FDA's approval will make it widely available to doctors.

A federal health official said yesterday June 10 that plastic baby bottles and water bottles are safe to use and would not cause any harm to infants and young children. Bay bottles and water bottles commonly contain a toxic chemical called bisphenol A, which make the plastic material solid and unbreakable. A tiny amount of the chemical can be released from polycarbonate plastic over the time, particularly under certain conditions such as high temperature. The National Toxicology Program, an agency under the Department of Health and Human Services, said early in a draft report that there is some concern that bisphenol A may alter behavior and the brain and it may also reduce survival and birth weight in fetuses in animal studies, Reuters reported. Dr. Norris Alderson, the Food and Drug Administration's associate commissioner for science yesterday told the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection Committee on Energy and Commerce that the level is not high enough to

It could be months before state investigators determine why a covered wooden walkway collapsed at an East Village construction site Thursday, sending 15 people to hospitals, a spokesman with the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health said Friday. Two people one who suffered a broken back and one a fractured leg were in critical condition and remained at Scripps Mercy Hospital, a hospital spokeswoman said. Some of the hospitalized are homeless people who live at St. Vincent de Paul Village across the street from the construction site, said Father Joe Carroll, president of the village.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration continued its investigation Friday into an elevator accident at Optical Polymers International that sent five people to the hospital Thursday morning. The most seriously injured employee was a 29-year-old man, who company officials refused to identify. He was apparently pinned in the elevator shaft by a 1,000-pound cargo elevator.

For IT security professionals, 2003 promises to be a year filled with old and new challenges. Whether balancing the needs of security with the push for greater access to data, coping with government mandates or planning for possible budget cuts, IT security managers have their hands full. Frank M. Richards is already scrambling to deal with those challenges. As CIO at Geisinger Health System, a health care network in Danville, Pa., that serves more than 2 million people, he faces an April deadline for compliance with the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The law will require health care organizations to safeguard patient data from unauthorized access and disclosure. But HIPAA sets goals without giving specifics on how to get there, so Richards must balance the legal requirements with a demand from health professionals for ease of access -- a daunting challenge.

When health care CIOs gather these days, the IT fallout from HIPAA is the main topic of conversation, says Pam McNutt, CIO at Methodist Hospitals of Dallas, a $275 million health care group that includes two large hospitals and four family medical centers in Texas. Methodist Hospitals has no fewer than 13 committees that study the various aspects of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which is a set of federal regulations intended to protect and simplify the exchange of health care data and save the industry money.

Have you noticed that the Web sites for your bank, securities broker and other financial businesses have begun to ask you for information that only you would know? If you haven't noticed, you will. Typical questions are: What is the name of your first pet? What was the name of the high school you attended? What is your favorite movie? They vary, but they draw from a rather limited set of questions that only you would know the answers to and that you can remember easily. Why would this suddenly start happening widely? Banks and other financial institutions are regulated by a government entity called the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, or FFIEC for short. The FFIEC has regulatory power to

This Spring and Summer has been the season of food illness outbreaks with the Salmonella outbreak across North America, several small E. Coli outbreaks and a current listeriosis outbreak in Canada. The decision by the Food and Drug Administration of the United States to allow the irradiation of lettuce and spinach is a decision that many in the industry feel is almost too little too late. The FDA is insisting that it will mean that dangerous bacteria that may be present on the surface of foods such as lettuce and spinach will be killed by the irradiation without doing any harm to the food itself.

OSHA said Friday it has signed a strategic partnership agreement with the U.S. Department of the Army to continue their commitment to improving the safety and health of civilian and contract employees working at Army installations. In all, 37 installations and organizations will participate in the partnership to achieve the following goals: Reduce civilian and contractor workforce fatalities, injuries, and illnesses at each participating Army installation by at least 3 percent each year consistent with the President's Safety, Health and Return-to-Employment (SHARE) goals. Increase awareness of the value of effective safety and health management systems

So, HHS has been raising hackles all around of late, in part due to the rough kickoff of the National Provider Identifier requirement, and partly due to its proposal that providers switch over to ICD-10 coding within a few years. Now, it's taking on standards for e-prescribing transaction coding, and this time around, at least, it seems a bit more accommodating. The agency has proposed that two widely-used standards for billing pharmacy-related professional services and supplies should both be allowed for use. It notes that such a compromise is the best way to handle the situation, given that neither of the two have full support of the players involved and HIPAA's transaction and code set requirements needs use of both for certain elements.

For the trade finance fraternity, the Export-Import Banks annual Washington conference is a welcome networking opportunity, a rare chance for over a thousand professionals to catch up, swap yarns, share market intelligence. At the April 2008 gathering, Ex-Ims own news was limited. But, this year more than ever, participants listened intently to the luncheon speaker: Lawrence Lindsey, an economist and former White House official, prognosticated on the course of the mounting credit crunch. His forecast: the end was probably in sight for the crisis in mortgage lending, but others would follow, in auto loans and credit cards.

The four Wisconsin OSHA offices are offering a one-day training conference scheduled for September 9 in Wisconsin Dells, Wis., to advise professional caregivers on how to avoid ergonomic injuries, falls, and work-related illnesses. The conference, to begin with registration at 7:30 a.m. and adjourn at 4:15 p.m. CDT at the Chula Vista Resort, is the third in as many years created by OSHA's Wisconsin offices in a continuing effort to help caregivers understand how to protect themselves and work safely as they help others. Registration is available on the Web site of the Wisconsin Health Care Association, one of several co-sponsors for the conference, at www.whca.com.

The recent securities pact between the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Australian Securities and Investment Commission is seen as a step towards the SECs goal of globalizing investing. In another step towards achieving this goal, the SEC has now floated a plan that could require U.S. companies to switch to international accounting standards starting in 2014 and permit others to make the switch even sooner. The switch to international standards could be staggered starting with large U.S. companies in 2014, followed by mid-sized companies in 2015, and small companies in 2016. A small group of large companies could begin using the standards as early as next year. To qualify, the company must be among the 20 largest companies in its industry and a large number of its competitors would have to already be using the international standards.

It seems that some suicides might be linked to a variety of drugs that are surprising experts. In one case, the Associated Press (AP) reports a 15-year-old high school football player taking the allergy and asthma medication Singular hanged himself. In another, the AP reports that a physician taking Neurontin for an old back injury also hanged himself. The victims families believe the drugs, which were prescribed to relieve physicalnot psychologicalsymptoms, upset their family members mental and emotional balance. Now, federal drug regulators are investigating, says the AP. About two months following the teens suicide, Merck & Companymaker of Singulairrevised its prescribing literature to indicate that some patients experienced suicidal thinking and behavior. Merck said that the death could be a coincidence. Singulair is a really effective drug that has been on the market 10 years and has been taken by millions of patients, said Dr. Alan Ezekowitz, an asthma expert with M

Two weeks ago, the House Energy & Commerce Committee stepped up its probe of the controversial cholesterol pill by demanding Merck and Schering-Plough, which jointly market Vytorin, turn over documents relating to the SEAS trial and its analysis. This trial, you may recall, turned up an unexpected link to cancer and cancer-related deaths (back story). In particular, the committee wanted the analysis by Oxford Universitys Richard Peto, who is running one of two larger Vytorin trials and maintains the cancer findings are a bizarre fluke. His report, which the drugmakers insist they did not underwrite, was submitted to the FDA. But the drugmakers refused to provide the report without assurances it wouldnt be released to the public. Instead, the committee was told to get the report from the FDA, since Peto provided a copy to the agency.

Food and milk from the offspring of cloned animals may have entered the U.S. food supply, the U.S. government said on Tuesday, but it would be impossible to know because there is no difference between cloned and conventional products. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said in January meat and milk from cloned cattle, swine and goats and their offspring were as safe as products from traditional animals. Before then, farmers and ranchers had followed a voluntary moratorium on the sale of clones and their offspring.

The Food and Drug Administration has extended the comment period on a final rule to prohibit extralabel uses of cephalosporins in food animals. According to the rule, the FDA decided on the prohibition because of information supporting the agency's conclusion that extralabel uses of the cephalosporin class of antimicrobial drugs are likely contributing to the emergence of cephalosporin-resistant foodborne pathogens.Various parties asked the FDA to extend the comment period so they could examine the available evidence, consider the impact of the ruling, and provide constructive comment. The agency granted an additional 60 days, extending the comment period to Nov. 1 and delaying the effective date of the final rule to Nov. 30.

CMS is adding more information to its Hospital Compare consumer Web site to allow people to better compare the quality of care provided by their local hospitals. According to a press release, the improvements include the addition of a mortality measure for pneumonia and publicly reported measures for hospital care of children. Previously, Hospital Compare had provided only quality information based on hospitalizations of adult patients.

Whistle-blower administrative complaints and lawsuits by current and former employees against employers are all the rage at present. Such complaints and lawsuits are common, and many of them make headlines. No employer wants to be part of such a complaint or lawsuit (or any lawsuit, for that matter). But how can an employer best defend against such a complaint or lawsuit? The best way is by documenting interactions with employees. Well, I guess a caveat to that sentence should be by properly documenting interactions with employees.

OSHA has cited Designer's Stone Co. of Watertown, Mass., for alleged repeat and serious safety and health violations and failing to correct hazards cited during a previous agency inspection. A total of $40,600 in fines is proposed. These latest citations and fines result from an OSHA inspection opened Feb. 13 to verify correction of hazards the agency cited in August 2007. The follow-up inspection found that four of 17 cited conditions remained uncorrected. These included inadequate or incomplete hazard communication training for employees working with chemicals, flammables and silica produced during stone grinding; unlabeled containers of hazardous chemicals; ungrounded fans; and unmarked circuit breakers. These conditions resulted in the issuance of four failure-to-abate notices carrying $21,000 in fines.

The United States Department of Labors Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is accepting public comments on a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) on personal protective equipment (PPE) and training standards. The proposal clarifies that when an OSHA standard requires an employer to provide PPE, such as respirators, or training to employees, the employer must do so for each employee subject to the requirement. Each employee not protected may be considered a separate violation for penalty purposes. We want employers to understand the importance of complying with OSHAs PPE rule for each and every one of their employees, says Edwin Foulke Jr., assistant secretary of labor for OSHA. Without question, providing PPE for all employees will reduce costs, save money and, most importantly, save lives.

How would you feel about your personal health information flowing freely over the Internet between public health officials, healthcare providers, insurance and data clearinghouse companies, and others without your permission? If this doesn't sound like a good idea, it's time to become informed about federal health privacy law. Today, when Americans visit a healthcare provider for services (including dental and eye exams), they receive a form with a title such as

FRSGlobal, the only global provider of regulatory reporting solutions for over 30 countries, today announced the acquisition of Iris integrated risk management AG (IRIS), a provider of risk management solutions. The acquisition enables FRSGlobal to introduce the first combined risk and regulatory reporting solution for financial services addressing the need to create a single, reliable data framework to best manage risk and meet increasing global regulatory demands. The deal is supported by The Carlyle Group and Kennet Partners, the private equity investors in FRSGlobal, and is subject to EU approval. Upon completion, FRSGlobal will become the largest independent software and services supplier operating in this space.

The rules regulating over-the-counter children's cold medicines are about to be revised by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), the agency announced late last week. Concern has been growing over the past several years that over-the-counter cold medicines meant for child are ineffective and unsafe, and many patient advocates hope the impending rule changes could ultimately lead to the drugs being removed from the market. Earlier this year, the FDA issued a warning advising that over-the-counter cold and cough medicines should not be given to children under two. The warning came after a 2007 study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control found that between 2004 and 2005, 1,500 children under the age of 2 had been injured by common over-the-counter decongestants and antihistamines. A second study by FDA safety reviewers reached similar conclusions. Their research found that from 1969 to 2006, at least 54 children died after taking over the counter decongestants, and 69 died after tak

When government investigators found a hot trail to a potential cause of the salmonella outbreak that had confounded them for weeks, it led them to the Pink Palace. Nicknamed for its pink paint job, the palace is the McAllen Produce Terminal Market, a 42-acre wholesale market five miles north of a major border crossing point for Mexican fresh produce entering the United States. From concrete loading docks, 100 small distributors and importers daily peddle tons of fresh produce -- including Mexican-grown peppers, limes, mangos and watermelon -- mostly to supermarket and restaurant buyers.

Comodo, a leading Certification Authority and Internet security company, announced today the availability of version 1.0 of SecureEmail. Comodo SecureEmail employs well-established, de facto industry standard, PKI-based solutions/technologies that enable encryption and digital signature of outgoing emails, assuring recipients that the email has not been tampered with during transmission. Comodo's solution can be deployed with either Comodo or third party SSL Certificates. Email is one of the most vulnerable systems to attack. Comodo SecureEmail is the install-and-forget application that can automatically encrypt and sign all messages. Featuring full integration with Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird and other S/MIME-capable email clients, it includes a built-in wizard that allows users to easily download and setup a free Comodo email certificate. This helps automate the digital certificate acquisition, distribution, signature and encryption processes, freely building a secure emai

For many corporate executives, complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is a lot like cleaning out a cluttered basement -- dreaded and tedious, but necessary. That's because the federal law requires business managers to continually identify, monitor and verify that they have effective financial controls in place. Now that most large publicly held firms have gone through at least one round of meeting these so-called Section 404 requirements, many executives have recognized the need to automate those controls processes in order to make those activities repeatable and cheaper to maintain. Big companies like Time Warner Inc. and The Dow Chemical Co. each devoted hundreds of thousands of man-hours in 2004 to manually identifying, evaluating and testing their business and IT controls.

Sarbanes-Oxley has been estimated to have cost U.S. businesses more than 30 million dollars. The law was created to require publicly held corporations to be more accurate, reliable and accountable to shareholders in the presentation of their financial statements and disclosures. The Act itself as born out of public demand stemming from the financial scandals that shook the corporate world with some of the higher profile cases involving Enron and WorldCom. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) sets up regulations over a range of financial matters that focus on auditor independence and corporate responsibility for financial reporting. The provisions are clear and the penalties are significant in terms of corporations adhering to the financial guidelines set forth by the Act. Chief executive officers and chief financial officers sign-off of financial statements are required; the officers must state that all financial information has been resented fairly with U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with Sarbanes-Oxley last week when it decided the issues raised in a suit filed against the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) did not merit a trial. The plaintiffs alleged that, inasmuch as Sarbanes-Oxley created the PCAOB so that its members are appointed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the law violates the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The Appointments Clause requires executive officers to be appointed by the President, subject to the advice and consent of the Senate.

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Friday rejected a legal challenge to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act co-authored by former Maryland Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes. The six-year-old law, which requires top executives of publicly traded companies to certify corporate financial statements and increases the level of auditing, has been criticized by some Maryland business executives for being too costly and unclear. Rockville real estate development company Bresler & Reiner recently delisted from the over-the-counter bulletin board regulated stock service due largely to the costs involved in complying with the law.

The U.S. Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is proposing $65,450 in penalties against American Air Specialists of Mississippi for one willful and four serious safety violations of OSHA standards. In March, three employees of the company died in Hattiesburg, Miss., when the west wall of an excavation for a new storm water drain line collapsed, trapping and burying the employees.

Amgen (Nasdaq: AMGN) investors can finally breathe a little sigh of relief after the biopharma giant announced on Friday that the Food and Drug Administration had finally approved its blood disorder drug Nplate for marketing. After having its Nplate marketing application decision delayed twice by the FDA, first in April and a second time in July, Amgen finally got the go-ahead to sell Nplate as a treatment for a rare chronic blood platelet disorder called chronic immune thrombocytopenic purpura (ITP). Amgen estimates that there are 60,000 patients in the U.S. being treated with steroids and other drugs for thrombocytopenia and 140,000 total, counting Europe. None of these treatments are very effective, and Amgen will have a good opportunity to carve out a large market for itself, depending on how another potential thrombocytopenia treatment, Promacta, from GlaxoSmithKline and Ligand Pharmaceuticals, fares with the FDA.

The rules regulating over-the-counter childrens cold medicines are about to be revised by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), the agency announced late last week. Concern has been growing over the past several years that over-the-counter cold medicines meant for child are ineffective and unsafe, and many patient advocates hope the impending rule changes could ultimately lead to the drugs being removed from the market. Earlier this year, the FDA issued a warning advising that over-the-counter cold and cough medicines should not be given to children under two. The warning came after a 2007 study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control found that between 2004 and 2005, 1,500 children under the age of 2 had been injured by common over-the-counter decongestants and antihistamines. A second study by FDA safety reviewers reached similar conclusions. Their research found that from 1969 to 2006, at least 54 children died after taking over the counter decongestants, and 69 died after

Two-to-one opinion by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, upholding the creation of a nonprofit board to set auditing requirements and oversee accounting firms that audit public companies. The authority of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board had been challenged by Beckstead and Watts, a Nevada accounting firm, and the Free Enterprise Fund, as violating the constitutional separation of powers. The ruling is here. From Washington Post,

Most investors think Sarbanes-Oxley regulations have been the rule of the road in corporate governance since put into law in 2002. That has never quite been true. The law has been challenged in the courts for almost six years, accused of giving the federal government too much power to push public companies around. What appears to be the final challenge to Sarbanes came to an end as a federal appeals court turned back a legal challenge to the act. According to The Washington Post,

Even CEOs can't read statements compliant with the law.The goal of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act was to make corporate accounting more transparent. In practice, a new Cato Institute study finds, the law's requirements have had the opposite effect. Sarbanes-Oxley sought to achieve its aims by having the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) mandate that corporations use Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) in reporting their balance sheets to shareholders. In the Cato Institute Briefing Paper

An effort to overturn the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has failed, with a federal appeals court upholding a nonprofit board that polices accounting firms. The creation of the board, known as the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, is central to the 2002 law, which was passed after the accounting scandals involving Enron and WorldCom. Critics say the intensive auditing requirements imposed on public companies are expensive to comply with and are undermining American competitiveness against foreign companies. At issue in the appeal was whether the creation of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board violated the Constitution's separation of powers clause by leaving the president with too little oversight. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit decided Friday in 2-1 vote that the board, whose members can't be directly removed by the president, was constitutional.

The easiest part of dealing with medical identity theft is taking care of the bills that land on your doorstep. If youre being asked to pay for health care services received by someone else: -- Contact the police department immediately and let them know someone has stolen personal information and sought medical care using your name. If they seem reluctant to help, tell them you need a police report to establish that youve been the victim of identity theft, said Jay Foley, executive director of the Identity Theft Resource Center. -- Get a copy of your credit report from the three leading credit agencies. (Click here for information on how to do that.) The credit report will show you other outstanding medical charges that the thief may have run up in your name. -- Write to your insurance company and the medical providers that have contacted you, letting them know youve been taken advantage of and are disputing the charges. Include a copy of the police report (and, of course, keep a co

The Food and Drug Administration issued a regulation Thursday allowing spinach and lettuce sellers to zap fresh spinach and iceberg lettuce with just enough radiation to kill E. coli and a few other germs, a long-awaited move amid increasing illness outbreaks from raw produce. Farms and processors still must follow standard rules to keep the greens as clean as possible and consumers, too, should wash the leaves before eating. Irradiated meat has been around for years, particularly ground beef that is a favorite hiding spot for E. coli. Spices also can be irradiated.

Last week, an op-ed appeared in the Wall Street Journal that highlighted some of the unintended consequences of government over-regulation. The article was written by Greg Conko of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank. Conko recounted two recent cases that demonstrate how the Food and Drug Administration's tiresome approval process prevents cancer-stricken Americans from voluntarily using experimental drugs. A few years ago, an Indiana woman named Kianna Karnes wanted to use pharmaceuticals developed by Bayer and Pfizer to help combat her terminal kidney cancer. Although the drugs wouldn't have cured the disease, they might have improved Ms. Karnes' quality of life in the time she had left. However, the FDA requires that experimental cancer drugs go through unnecessary clinical trials before they can be distributed on a limited,

An appeals court yesterday upheld the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, dismissing arguments that the government's attempt to protect investors from repeats of the scandals at Enron and WorldCom gave federal overseers unchecked power. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected a challenge to the heart of the act, the creation of a nonprofit board to set auditing requirements and police the accounting firms that audit public companies.

Candi Sumlin wept when she heard the federal government had proposed a $65,450 penalty for American Air Specialists of Mississippi - a company her cousin was working for when he and two others were killed during a March 21 trench collapse.

Federal regulators are planning to launch a broad new review of whether over-the-counter cold medicines are safe and effective for children under 12. The Food and Drug Administration said Friday that it will hold public hearings on the medications in October, the first step in what will likely be a long study that could lead to stricter age guidelines, changes in formulas and recommended dosages, and the removal of some products from the market, said Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA's center for drug evaluation and research.

The Food and Drug Administration yesterday announced plans to revise standards for over-the-counter cough and cold medications for children, a step that could lead to removing the popular products from the market. In response to rising concerns that the products are ineffective and could be unsafe, the agency said that, for the first time in decades, it will revamp the criteria that have allowed the products to remain on drugstore shelves.

NaturalNews has learned that the FDA is intentionally plotting to deceive consumers over the labeling of irradiated foods, attempting to eliminate any requirement for informative labeling or replace the word