Clarcon products

Clarcon products have hit the news today as US Marshals entered the production facility of Clarcon Labs and confiscated all of their stock, ingredients and components. Quite why the FDA decided to send in the US Marshals to do this to Clarcon and their products rather escapes analysis.

My colleague has the details on the Clarcon products and what was wrong with them and what you should do with them if you should happen to have any in the house.However, the larger question is just why have the FDA sent in the federal Marshals to make this confiscation of Clarcon's products?The background is that the FDA found bacterial infections in some samples of Clarcon's products. Clarcon, rightly (not that they had much choice in the matter) agreed to recall all of their products from the retail and wholesale chain. These recalled Clarcon products, along with their various ingredients to make the next batches, work in progress and so on, were all seized by the Marshals.

But that is the part of the story that doesn't make much sense. The FDA's justification is that the seizure was done to ensure that the Clarcon products did not enter the retail chain and thus endanger the public. OK, but as Clarcon had recalled all these products, clearly and obviously, they weren't going to reenter that retail chain. So why seize them so as to destroy them?Most especially, why destroy all of the recalled products when no one, not the FDA, not Clarcon and certainly not anyone else, know how many of them were in fact infected, infected with what to what levels of infection nor why they were?

Did Clarcon have a basic problem in the very formulation of their products? An error or mistake in their manufacturing process? Contamination of a batch by mistake? Contamination in the retail chain? Even, heaven forfend, was the contamination in the FDA's own testing labs (believe this reporter, stranger things have happened in the past).If all of Clarcon's products are destroyed, as the FDA insists, then these questions can never be answered. Far be it for anyone to start conspiracy theories, but there does have to be at least some consideration given to the idea that the FDA would rather not find out these answers, thus the insistence on the destruction.Especially since there have been a grand total of zero reports to the FDA of the products actually doing any harm.Of the original FDA testing and product recall Clarcon had this to say:

Markham says Clarcon tested the same batches of products as the FDA and that the FDA did not find contamination in all of the random samples it checked.

"Our findings are not matching their findings," Markham says. "This may be a small, isolated issue ... they only found it in a couple of [bottles]."

Hmm: is it possible to be too cynical about the incentives faced by bureaucrats?Not that it this reporter is going to have all that much sympathy with Clarcon Labs itself in a general sense. Here's a "testimonial" on their website for one of their products.

This condition would not clear up, and for seven years I have been taking massive amounts of antibiotics just to get through the day without ever being able to go off of them, until I met Bill Markham, the President of Clarcon Biological Chemistry Laboratory Inc. Bill suggested I place a product they call Clarcon Anti Microbial in my nasal passages, which contains live altered, but naturally good bacteria to eat the mold, this, at first scared me. For weeks from the first time I had your bottle in my possession I would just look at it without trying it, but I felt in some strange way it may just be the answer to my problems. Then with the return of a bad infection I knew I was in trouble and tried the product. I had nothing to lose but my own life anyway as I was heading down the same old path of pneumonia and did not want to end up in ICU again! In 72 hours the infection reversed.

No, it's very hard to have much sympathy for a company claiming that its products, which are absolutely not medicines, have seen off an infection that 7 years of antibiotics have failed to shift.But then even, as Larry Flynt so righteously pointed out, the law isn't there just for the good guys. "If the law will protect a scumbag like me then you can be sure that it will protect you" he said. Which means that we really do need to know why the FDA insists upon the destruction of all of the Clarcon products before we know how widespread, to what levels and why the contamination occured.