Kimberly Egan

Partner Co-Chair, health care, litigation and regulatory law

Kimberly Egan is a litigation and regulatory lawyer with a background in pharmaceutical and medical device litigation and advice, Consumer Product Safety Commission work, food safety counseling and litigation, and commercial and mass tort litigation. Her food work has included risk-management planning and strategic assessments related to obesity claims, litigation analyses in connection with an acquisition of a company manufacturing dietary supplements, advice on FDA’s food additive and food contact regulations, advice on FDA’s Generally Regarded as Safe (GRAS) regulations, and general advice on food safety issues, product recalls, and supply-chain rationalization. She is a regular contributor to the AssurX blog.

Fri, 06/28/2013 - 11:42
Eating GMOs Isn’t Kosher for Anyone Some indigestible facts you might not want to read over lunch
Fri, 06/28/2013 - 11:42
What do China, Maine, Connecticut, Chipotle, and Whole Foods have in common? They all think you have a right to know whether the food you are eating contains any genetically modified organisms, known as GMOs. I like that. Why do I care? Because…
Tastes Like Chicken With a side of bacteria
Wed, 04/24/2013 - 12:05
FDA’s latest Annual Meat Report is out. It analyzes food-borne bacteria in retail meat, particularly Salmonella, Campylobacter, Enterococcus, and E. coli. Salmonella causes typhoid. Campylobacter causes spontaneous abortions in animals and…
Airline Food and Whine We complain about airline food for good reason
Wed, 03/13/2013 - 12:31
My boyfriend and I were recently discussing why it is that wine on an airplane tastes so terrible. The only perk these days in many first-class cabins is a free glass of gawdawful wine. Just gawdawful. Why? It turns out that airline food and wine…
Simple Nutrition Facts for Complicated People Food for thought for winners of the fattest nation contest
Tue, 02/19/2013 - 11:16

Nutrition labels have been much in the news lately, presumably because we have once again won the fattest nation contest. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and various nutrition researchers have all put out some thought-provoking…
Save Us from Sprouts and Cilantro FDA’s ‘Proposed Rule for Produce’ tidies up the dirty task of growing things
Mon, 01/28/2013 - 12:44

On Jan. 4, 2013, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) took the first step in its history to regulate produce farmers. The agency issued a 547-page proposed rule that spends a lot of time reducing everything humanity has learned about plants…
This Headline Does Not Use the Phrase ‘Meat Glue’ The sticky little secret behind TG enzyme
Thu, 05/24/2012 - 15:01
Today we’re going to talk about transglutaminase. It’s an enzymatic glue with which you can stick two proteins together. Doctors and biologists call it Factor VIII, and it is one of the many amino acids involved in one of my favorite biological…
Watermelons Are Sensitive Exploding fruit object to forchlorfenuron overdoses in China
Fri, 09/30/2011 - 10:13
Last May, the director of the vegetable research institute at the Qingdao Academy of Agricultural Science in Qingdao, China, told the media that the Chinese government does not encourage farmers to use plant hormones on watermelons because…
Much Ado About Bean Sprouts FDA slams producer for touting sprouts’ miracle medical benefits
Thu, 06/02/2011 - 06:00
I don’t know how I missed this gem, but on March 24, 2011, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent a Warning Letter to Jonathan’s Sprouts Inc. informing the company that it was (among other things) marketing its organic mung bean, alfalfa, and…
Congressional Committee to Reduce Waste, Eliminates Self Audit of federal agency overlap runs up against entrenched confusion
Wed, 03/09/2011 - 09:05
It turns out that I am not the only one who has noticed that food regulation is sometimes a little, well, silly. The federal government recently “identified a mother lode of government waste and duplication” and decided that getting rid of it “could…