WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama intends to name former New York City Health Commissioner Margaret Hamburg to lead the troubled Food and Drug Administration.
Hamburg and Baltimore Health Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein have been talked about for weeks as the leading candidates for the top two spots at the agency.
Hamburg, 53, is a bioterrorism expert who served as an assistant health secretary during the Clinton administration and helped lay the groundwork for much of the government’s bioterrorism and pandemic flu planning.
But she may be best known as the chief health officer of the nation’s largest city during the early 1990s, when she designed a program that cut high rates of drug-resistant tuberculosis, supported needle-exchange to cut the spread of the AIDS virus and helped introduce smoking restrictions.
