Yes, incentives are such that only a handful of enormous companies can comply with the regulations and profitably produce formula. Then there's a whole process to bring new production facilities online, which makes it difficult to respond to problems of this sort. This is a problem, "nefarious" or not.
And harmonizing the regs would help, but they'd still be onerous regs that would prevent small batch formula from small local producers (eg. the dairy farm down the road).
Perhaps, but in the current situation where there are shortages and the military is airlifting small quantities from Europe, I suspect people would take what they could get. And if their choice was between "let your infant starve" and "feed your infant the formula made from the 100 year-old recipe fed to your great-grandparents that the dairy down the street is making" they might choose the latter.
I'm not against regulation; I simply think we should punish (including executing) those who do harm and leave those who aren't harming others alone. There's a very wide chasm between "safe" and "complies with FDA regulations"; I have direct experience with this.
Ultimately risk is dependent on alternatives, and if the alternative is "your baby starves to death" then bespoke formula made by the diary down the street sounds pretty good.
The FDA didn't exist until 1906: what do you think people did before then? My great-grandparents were subsistence farmers who if you told them that infants were at risk of starving in 2022 would have looked at you funny, because if they weren't breast-feeding they would have just given their babies some milk from their cows with whatever extras the local midwife suggested. None of which went through a multi-million dollar clinical study.
Yes, incentives are such that only a handful of enormous companies can comply with the regulations and profitably produce formula. Then there's a whole process to bring new production facilities online, which makes it difficult to respond to problems of this sort. This is a problem, "nefarious" or not.
And harmonizing the regs would help, but they'd still be onerous regs that would prevent small batch formula from small local producers (eg. the dairy farm down the road).
Perhaps, but in the current situation where there are shortages and the military is airlifting small quantities from Europe, I suspect people would take what they could get. And if their choice was between "let your infant starve" and "feed your infant the formula made from the 100 year-old recipe fed to your great-grandparents that the dairy down the street is making" they might choose the latter.
I'm not against regulation; I simply think we should punish (including executing) those who do harm and leave those who aren't harming others alone. There's a very wide chasm between "safe" and "complies with FDA regulations"; I have direct experience with this.
Ultimately risk is dependent on alternatives, and if the alternative is "your baby starves to death" then bespoke formula made by the diary down the street sounds pretty good.
The FDA didn't exist until 1906: what do you think people did before then? My great-grandparents were subsistence farmers who if you told them that infants were at risk of starving in 2022 would have looked at you funny, because if they weren't breast-feeding they would have just given their babies some milk from their cows with whatever extras the local midwife suggested. None of which went through a multi-million dollar clinical study.