Here's an interesting tie-in with the Philadelphia fact-sheet story. The "47 page petition" mentioned in this story was the work of IAOMT.
From FDAwebview.com:
FDA Ready to Reverse Itself on Amalgam?
05/19/2010
FDA has never been known to admit it made a mistake, but it may be preparing to do so now on last August’s final rule declaring mercury-based dental amalgam safe. One big factor holding it back is likely to be how to save face — how to dress-up its reversal in the armor of legal consistency and “new” data that were not available when the final rule went to press. The data reportedly aren’t really that new — they just weren’t considered by FDA’s amalgam rule lead reviewer Susan Runner before the rule was finalized. These data, on extreme toxicity reactivity in infants implanted with amalgam — underpinned a Health Canada decision to recommend against amalgam use in 1995, according to a 9/15/09, 47-page petition, one of two against dental amalgam that are under review at the agency.
“That we’ve taken so long to examine those petitions is a good sign for you,” a CDRH staffer reviewing them reportedly told one of the petitioners recently. Another sign, according to Consumers for Dental Choice national counsel Charles G. Brown, is the agency’s reported failure to recommend to the City of Philadelphia, as requested, that it not accede to local dental associations’ efforts to repeal a bylaw requiring dentists to issue fact sheets to patients warning of possible neurological damage from mercury before amalgam is implanted in their teeth.
Instead, Philadelphia Board of Health chairman Donald Schwarz, reportedly a friend of FDA principal deputy commissioner Joshua Sharfstein who had final sign-off responsibility for the final rule, announced to the board at its 5/13 meeting that FDA had requested he remove no warnings from the fact sheet.
“We won several other important victories,” Brown said in a memo to his membership this week. “The board promised it would make no clandestine attempts to change the fact sheet without public hearings. The dentist member of the Board of Health — a pro-mercury dentist who appears to read from a script handed to her by the ADA — excused herself from the meeting altogether, appropriately recusing herself from future considerations of the issue.
“Furthermore, the board publicly condemned dentists who were misrepresenting the fact sheet as a consent form for amalgam and then denying treatment when parents refused to sign.”
What form FDA’s amalgam-is-safe reversal might take is a closely held secret. In January, the agency tersely denied that it was considering a possible proposal to repeal last August’s rule.
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