History of the Food and Drug Administration
In June 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the Food and Drug Act, also known as the "Wiley Act" after its chief advocate. The Act prohibited, under penalty of seizure of goods, the interstate transport of food which had been "adulterated," with that term referring to the addition of fillers of reduced "quality or strength," coloring to conceal "damage or inferiority," formulation with additives "injurious to health," or the use of "filthy, decomposed, or putrid" substances. The act applied similar penalties to the interstate marketing of "adulterated" drugs, in which the "standard of strength, quality, or purity" of the active ingredient was not either stated clearly on the label or listed in the "United States Pharmacopoeia" or the "National Formulary". The act also banned "misbranding" of food and drugs. The responsibility for examining food and drugs for such "adulteration" or "misbranding" was given to Wiley's USDA Bureau of Chemistry.
Organophosphate
Organophosphates (OPs) were among the most widely used insecticides until the 21st century. And until the mid 1990s, general pesticide regulation was dependent on the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act (FFDCA) and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) passed in 1938 and 1947, respectively. In 1993, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was bound by a pledge made to Congress to significantly reduce the amount of pesticides used in the United States, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, along with the Food and Drug Administration, joined the EPA in this commitment. Then, in 1996, The Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) was signed into law to strengthen the regulation of pesticide in food and make regulation practices more consistent. One way that this strengthening was accomplished was through mandating aggregate and cumulative exposure risk assessments in derivative food tolerance levels. The EPA selected OPs as the first class of pesticides for assessing food tolerances because of their specific toxicity behavior as acetylcholinesterase inhibitors.