BabyBIG and the story told by Joel Aleschia – BabyBIG, licensed in 2003, is a brand of human botulism immunoglobulin, an intravenous drug that uses antibodies from volunteers vaccinated against botulism to help children who are too young to fight the disease on their own. The treatment was the brainchild of the late Dr. Stephen Arnon, who was a scientist at the California Department of Public Health. In 1976, Arnon and his colleagues identified a rare form of botulism that affects children under 1 year of age. He then devoted his 45-year career to figuring out how to treat it. The disease occurs when children ingest botulism spores, which germinate in the intestines and produce a dangerous toxin that attacks the nervous system. More than 3,700 children worldwide have been treated with BabyBIG since Arnon and his team conducted a landmark clinical trial in California in 1997 that showed the drug could shorten hospital stays and reduce the need for breathing machines. BabyBIG is produced in small batches every five years and costs nearly $70,000 per treatment, according to the California Infant Botulism Treatment and Prevention Program, which Arnon founded. According to state law, fees from the sale of the drug are used only to fund the botulism control program. “It's almost a miracle,” said Dr. Vijay Viswanath, a pediatric neurologist at Children's Hospital Los Angeles who has treated several children with botulism in his career, including one during the current outbreak. “Before BabyBIG opened, some of these hospitalizations would have taken two or three months,” Viswanath said, if infected children had recovered at all.
Thank God, “Enemy of the People” – AP, Food Safety News, New York Times, Washington Post, Politico, Wall Street Journal, Food Fix, NPR, Stat News and other new media outlets that have devoted significant resources to food safety coverage and have focused even more resources on food safety-related coverage.
Our Federal Regulators – Investigators from CORE, CDC and CDPH FDA who cracked the code to solve the ByHeart outbreak (even though federal workers were not paid). FDA and FSIS food safety inspectors who continued to work during the shutdown without being paid. CDC officials working for the agency are investigating a foodborne outbreak that has been eradicated.
Our government regulators – Members of the Safe Food Coalition for advocating for food safety programs and fighting for reform (including building coalitions advocating the dismantling of FoodNet, the CDC's Division of Environmental Health, and developing a roadmap to address the baby formula outbreak).
Members of the Safe Food Coalition – They defend food safety programs and fight for reforms, including building coalitions advocating the dismantling of FoodNet, the CDC's environmental health division, and developing an action plan to combat the baby formula outbreak. Thanks to the Center for Food Safety, Center for Foodborne Illness Research and Prevention, Center for Progressive Reform, Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), Consumer Federation of America, Consumer Reports, Food & Water Watch and Government Accountability Project, National Consumers League, STOP Foodborne Illness, US PIRG, and Union of Food and Commercial Workers International (UFCW).
