Time to Block all Food and Medicine Imports from China
Sun May 06, 2007 at 06:57:27 AM PDT
How many instances of deadly tainted food and medicine does it take to finally come to the conclusion that the risk of importing food and drugs from China is too risky a proposition? Really....How many? How many pets and humans have to die before the FDA, manufacturers, and consumers say no more? At what point can nothing from China be trusted?
From the today's NYT:
From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine
The kidneys fail first. Then the central nervous system begins to misfire. Paralysis spreads, making breathing difficult, then often impossible without assistance. In the end, most victims die.
Many of them are children, poisoned at the hands of their unsuspecting parents.
The syrupy poison, diethylene glycol, is an indispensable part of the modern world, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze.
It is also a killer. And the deaths, if not intentional, are often no accident.
Over the years, the poison has been loaded into all varieties of medicine — cough syrup, fever medication, injectable drugs — a result of counterfeiters who profit by substituting the sweet-tasting solvent for a safe, more expensive syrup, usually glycerin, commonly used in drugs, food, toothpaste and other products.
Toxic syrup has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world in the past two decades. Researchers estimate that thousands have died. In many cases, the precise origin of the poison has never been determined. But records and interviews show that in three of the last four cases it was made in China, a major source of counterfeit drugs.
Panama is the most recent victim. Last year, government officials there unwittingly mixed diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine — with devastating results. Families have reported 365 deaths from the poison, 100 of which have been confirmed so far. With the onset of the rainy season, investigators are racing to exhume as many potential victims as possible before bodies decompose even more.
That's how the article starts. It continues by disclosing the details of how particular counterfeiters sold diethylene glycol as glycerin...how these individuals with no chemistry background got into selling counterfeit chemicals. And how the Chinese "regulatory system" can't touch these individuals since they have no jurisdiction over non-pharmaceutical companies that are selling these chemicals. It also, details how these chemicals go through multiple trading companies and how the documentation accompanying the material many times gets altered along the way making it impossible to know from what company the material originated from.
Money and greed drive the whole thing. All the examples given detail how the perpetrators do it to make more money. What astounds me is that companies will buy these components and fail to test the raw material by analytical chemistry methods such as mass spectrometry to confirm the identity of the raw material. For pharmaceuticals in this country, this is required by FDA. But for food components used in US prducts, I am not aware whether this is true, especially given what we all know happened with Menu Foods.
Last week, the United States Food and Drug Administration warned drug makers and suppliers in the United States "to be especially vigilant" in watching for diethylene glycol. The warning did not specifically mention China, and it said there was "no reason to believe" that glycerin in this country was tainted. Even so, the agency asked that all glycerin shipments be tested for diethylene glycol, and said it was "exploring how supplies of glycerin become contaminated."
China is already being accused by United States authorities of exporting wheat gluten containing an industrial chemical, melamine, that ended up in pet food and livestock feed. The F.D.A. recently banned imports of Chinese-made wheat gluten after it was linked to pet deaths in the United States.
Beyond Panama and China, toxic syrup has caused mass poisonings in Haiti, Bangladesh, Argentina, Nigeria and twice in India.
This alert by FDA was mentioned yesterday in Susan Hu's diary China Exports Poisoned Medicine While FDA Cuts Back Labs. Susan, Goldy and others are curious as to the timing of this release, questioning whether this had any connection with the tainted pet food, since diethylene glycol can and does cause kidney failure if it is ingested.
What Can Be Done?
The US government has two choices if it wants to protect its citizens.....get extremely vigilant about testing for known counterfeit components and ban imports of drugs and foodstuff that originates from China.
The first option can be problematic when there can be a host of contaminants we may not know to look for, especially in complex compoanents (not simple chemicals). And the second option can be tricky when raw materials can go through three or four differnet middlemen in countries other than China.
However, I believe a combination of both should be employed in this situation. If China can not get a handle on their counterfeit/contaminated raw materials problem, then the US should not allow raw products from their country to be imported into the country. AND US manufacturers and the FDA should be vigilantly testing these raw materials.
This will require George Bush to better fund FDA so that it can expand the number of testing labs it has along with the number of regulators inspecting manufacturing firms. This will require him to back greater regulation, not less, which goes against his ideology.
But it is time that Americans demand that everything possible be done to secure our food and drug supply from both counterfeiters and the terrorists George W. Bush so likes to invoke whenever he wants to prolong the war or secure more money for the military and Dept of Homeland Security.
Because, next time it might not be our pets that secumb to poisoning. It might be our kids or our parents.
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