Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, is featuring commentary from National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Chief Veterinarian, Dr. Kathy Simmons and Senior Director of Government Affairs, Tanner Beymer, about the reauthorization of the Animal Drug User Fee Act (ADUFA).
ADUFA must be reauthorized every five years to provide user fees to the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine to hire expert drug reviewers and to provide information to drug sponsors for new animal drugs.
ADUFA allows the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) to collect fees from animal health companies, which fund the agency’s review and approval process for new animal drugs. ADUFA ensures that the FDA has an efficient system for authorizing new cattle medicines and diagnostic tools that keep livestock healthy and protects our safe, wholesome food supply. NCBA fought hard to ensure that this latest ADUFA reauthorization contained no post-market amendments that would harm the effectiveness of the FDA’s review process, disrupt producers’ access to cattle medicines, or simply keep the legislation from passing Congress before the September 30th deadline.
“This money means new animal drugs in our toolbox will continue in a timely manner, and it also fosters innovation because it facilitates the drug approval process for the sponsors,” Simmons told Hays in an interview earlier this year.
NCBA’s Senior Director of Government Affairs, Tanner Beymer, also weighed in on the reauthorization and said the last-minute addition of the five-year reauthorization of ADUFA to the just passed Continuing Resolution that funds the federal government for the next forty-five days is a pleasant surprise and victory for animal agriculture.
“It prevents using some of those user fees from getting those drugs approved and implemented, and it goes into basically allowing FDA to oversee some of those distributions,” Beymer said. “Obviously, there have been a lot of conversations over the last several weeks and several months, I guess I should say, about how we go about getting ADUFA reauthorized in such a divided Congress.”
In the event that ADUFA was to expire, Beymer said many positions at the FDA would become vacant because there is no funding source to pay those employees.
“That would have had really dire consequences, particularly for veterinarians and those on the animal health side of our industry,” Beymer said. “Getting a clean reauthorization for five years and ensure there is no disruption to the system gives us that extra degree of certainty and allows us the opportunity to go in and have some of these conversations with FDA about these animal drug products that we use on a regular basis and ensure that there is no disruption from the system.”
The Beef Buzz is a regular feature heard on radio stations around the region on the Radio Oklahoma Ag Network and is a regular audio feature found on this website as well. Click on the LISTEN BAR for today’s show and check out our archives for older Beef Buzz shows covering the gamut of the beef cattle industry today.
