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Threat in Your Medicine Cabinet: The FDA's Gamble on America's Drugs


A ProPublica investigation found that for more than a decade, the FDA gave substandard factories banned from the United States a special pass to keep sending drugs to an unsuspecting public.

For years, the agency gave companies with a history of manufacturing breakdowns approval to produce an increasingly larger share of generic drugs, allowing them to become a dominant force in American medicine with the power to disrupt lives if production lines were shuttered. Because the agency publishes only a current list and doesn’t make the old ones public, the news organization used internet archives and FDA documents maintained by the data analytics company Redica Systems, ultimately compiling import alerts dating back more than a decade. Medill Investigative Lab students Haajrah Gilani, Emma McNamee, Julian Andreone, Isabela Lisco, Aidan Johnstone, Megija Medne, Yiqing Wang, Phillip Powell, Gideon Pardo, Casey He, Lindsey Byman, Josh Sukoff, Kunjal Bastola, Shae Lake, Alyce Brown, Zhiyu Solstice Luo, Jessie Nguyen, Sinyi Au, Kate McQuarrie and Katherine Dailey contributed reporting.

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