FUROR OVER FRUIT FROM CHILE : The FDA’s Chief Not One to Flee the Tough Calls

One afternoon nearly three years ago, in the midst of a nationwide Tylenol cyanide scare, Dr. Frank E. Young, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, could hardly control his wrath over the idea that someone would tamper with products purchased by American consumers.

“This kind of terrorism is just like a burglary,” he told a reporter. “In this case, the burglar burglarizes our trust. I get angry that someone would do this to us as citizens.”

There are few areas of the FDA’s vast jurisdiction, which includes the regulation of thousands of drugs, foods, cosmetics and medical devices, that arouse Young’s emotions like tampering, FDA officials said Tuesday.

“It’s almost a religious fervor” with Young, said one colleague. “He assumes almost a command post mentality.”

Young’s reaction this week--when notified that cyanide had been found in two Chilean grapes--echoed his sentiments in 1986 and in 1982 when containers of over-the-counter drugs were found to have been poisoned, although this time no one apparently was harmed or killed.

“This time he wasn’t wringing his hands and saying: ‘I want to get this guy,’ but he was agonizing,” said one FDA official close to Young, recalling the commissioner’s words: “How can we tell the American consumer how to tell the difference between a Chilean apple and another country’s apple when it isn’t packaged, or dated or stamped?”

The official said Young, a pathologist by training, was torn over what to do--worrying that too much publicity would encourage “copy cat” tampering but fearing that not enough action “might endanger the American consumer.” Finally, Young decided, as he said over and over again Tuesday, to be “better safe than sorry,” and call for the Chilean produce to be impounded.

His colleague added: “He worries very much over a decision like this. He’s a 24-hour-a-day man. He always goes 24 hours a day.”

Young, a native of Mineola, N.Y., is the former dean of the University of Rochester Medical School and was educated at Union College, the Medical Center of the State University of New York, and Case Western Reserve University. He and his wife Leanne have five children.

But Young, 58, who held the FDA post throughout the Reagan years, and was reappointed to serve again in the Bush Administration, is not without his detractors.

The FDA under him has been bitterly attacked by activist gay rights groups and some lawmakers for not moving fast enough on AIDS drugs and for not making experimental AIDS drugs more readily accessible to dying AIDS patients and, in other instances, for not regulating industry enough.

“He believes that the government should be a friendly partner of industry, instead of a regulating adversary,” said Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of the Public Citizen Health Research Group. “As a result, people have died or been injured because the industry hasn’t been regulated as tightly as it should.”