Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman

After weeks of rumours, the White House has reportedly settled on a nominee to head the embattled US Food and Drug Administration.

The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times, among others, are reporting today that she is Margaret (Peggy) Hamburg, 53, a physician and former health commissioner in New York City who used her bioterrorism expertise when she served as a key deputy in the US Department of Health and Human Services during the Clinton Administration. Earlier, in the late 1980s, she was an assistant director at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Most recently, she has been serving as a senior scientist at a Washington-based foundation called the Nuclear Threat Initiative, where she is in charge of a global health and security initiative.

While Hamburg’s resume – she boosted childhood immunization rates and launched a tuberculosis control program that led to dramatic declines in new cases of the disease in New York – would seem to make her a more obvious pick to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the wisdom inside Washington has it that her selection treads a careful political line aimed at alienating neither the drug industry nor consumer advocates, who charge that the agency has been lax in its drug safety policing and is too beholden to the industry it regulates. Other candidates like Steve Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic and Robert Califf, a Duke University cardiologist, could have galvanized serious opposition.

The reports also say that the Obama administration has settled on Joshua Sharfstein, the health commissioner in Baltimore, to be Hamburg’s chief deputy at FDA. Sharfstein, a 39-year-old physician who once worked for liberal Democrat Henry Waxman on Capitol Hill, put himself on the map in 2007 by successfully petitioning FDA to oppose the use of over-the-counter cold and cough medicines in children under two years old.

The FDA’s 11,000 employees are responsible for overseeing the safety of food, drugs and cosmetics that comprise roughly one-quarter of US consumer spending. Its newly-approved 2009 budget of $2.6 billion includes over $500 million in user fees paid by the drug industry.

Image credit: Nuclear Threat Initiative