填空题
Part B Directions: The following paragraphs are given in a wrong order. For Questions 41-45, you are required to reorganize these paragraphs into a coherent article by choosing from the list A-G to fill in each numbered box. The first and the last paragraphs have been placed for you in Boxes. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1.
[A] Then came Merck’s withdrawal from the market of its blockbuster anti-in-flammatory drug, Vioxx, because of an increase in side effects, including heart attacks and strokes. This led one of FDA’s medical officers, in November testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, to accuse his own colleagues of discounting recommendations from the agency’s safety researchers, and of consistently being in denial when data indicate safety problems from an approved drug.
[B] The first kind of error is highly visible, causing the regulators to be attacked by the media and patient groups, and to be investigated by Congress. But the second kind of error--keeping a potentially important product out of consumers’ hands--is usually a non-event, eliciting little attention, let alone outrage.
[C] The FDA is a favorite target of critics, who variously accuse regulators of excessive risk-aversion and delay of approvals, or of too cozy a relationship with the drug industry. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, recently chided the agency, "The health and safety of the public must be the FDA’s first and only concern."
[D] First the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) was blindsided by Chiron Corp. ’s inability to provide flu vaccine this season because of contamination at its manufacturing facility, depriving Americans of half the usual supply.
[E] Grassley is right, but particularly when governmental pre marketing approval of a product is required, greater safety is not synonymous with more stringent regulation. In fact, net benefit to patients often suffers because of an obscure regulatory anomaly: the asymmetry of outcomes from the two types of mistakes that regulators can make. A regulator can commit an error by permitting something bad to happen (approving a harmful product), or by preventing something good from becoming available (not approving a beneficial product). Both outcomes are bad for the public, but the consequences for the regulator are very different.
[F] As a result, regulators make decisions defensively--in other words, to avoid approvals of harmful products at any cost--so they tend to delay or reject new products of all sorts, from fat substitutes to vaccines and painkillers. That’s bad for public health and for consumers’ freedom to choose.
[G] Congress has a long and ignoble history of exaggerated legislative responses to perceived health crises. It seems to be at it again. Recent events have shifted the Congress into crisis mode once more.