BabyBIG and the story told by Joel Aleccia - Licensed in 2003, BabyBIG is the brand name for human botulism immune globulin, an IV medication that uses antibodies from volunteers vaccinated against botulism to help babies too young to fight the disease on their own. The treatment was the brainchild of the late Dr. Stephen Arnon, who was a scientist with the California Department of Public Health. In 1976, Arnon and colleagues identified the rare form of botulism that affects infants younger than 1 — and then spent his 45-year career figuring out how to treat it. The disease occurs when babies ingest botulism spores that germinate in the intestine 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 pivotal clinical trial in California in 1997 that showed the medication could shorten hospital stays and reduce the need for breathing machines. Produced in small batches every five years, BabyBIG costs nearly $70,000 per treatment, according to the California Infant Botulism Treatment and Prevention Program, which Arnon founded. Under state law, fees from the sale of the drug are used only to fund the botulism program. “This is almost like a miracle,” said Dr. Vijay Vishwanath, a pediatric neurologist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, who has treated several children with botulism during his career — including one in the current outbreak. “Prior to the discovery of BabyBIG, some of these hospitalizations would take two or three months,” Vishwanath said, if infected children recovered at all.
Thank goodness for the “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 outlets that have dedicated significant resources to covering food safety and expanded focused even greater resources on food safety related coverage.
Our Federal Regulators - The investigators at FDA's CORE, CDC, and CDPH who cracked the code to solve the ByHeart outbreak (While the federal workers were not being paid). The FDA and FSIS food safety inspectors who continued working during the shutdown without getting paid. The CDC foodborne outbreak investigating staff working in an agency that’s been decimated.
Our State Regulators - The members of the Safe Food Coalition, for defending food safety programs and fighting for reforms (including building coalitions defending rollbacks of FoodNet, CDC's Environmental Health Division, and laying a roadmap for addressing the infant formula outbreak).
The Members of the Safe Food Coalition - They are defending food safety programs and fighting for reforms (including building coalitions defending rollbacks of FoodNet, CDC's Environmental Health Division, and laying a roadmap for addressing the infant formula outbreak). Thank you, Center for Food Safety, Center for Foodborne Illness Research & 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, U.S. PIRG, and United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW).
