The USOC sent an advance team to China to scope out the food situation and they found a half chicken breast that was 14" long (yep, that's fourteen inches long). Yeah, that bird was on steroids.
So, what's the USOC going to do?
Have Tyson foods import chicken to China ahead of time for the Olympic Games. Why?...because that 14" long chicken breast is normal(?) fare in China. WADA regulations put the responsibility for compliance entirely upon the athlete. The USOC can't trust that Chinese foods aren't tainted with banned substances. The athletes dare not risk violating the WADA banned substance list, because inadvertent ingestion of a banned substance is treated with the same severity as intentional doping and most athletes see the doping appeal process as a waste of time.
China, is the second largest trade partner to the U.S. The USOC doesn't put much stock in the new Chinese food quality safety label required on all foods produced in China as of January 1st, 2008. The stakes are too high for the athlete and the solution to import food they know is safe to eat was an unmistakeable message to China. Then the NYT article closed with what I thought was a foolish thought.
Once athletes are finished competing, they are free — encouraged, even — to sample the local fare. That could mean munching on live sea horses or hard-boiled fertilized duck eggs — though steering clear of adulterated chicken breasts.
Is that speaking out of both sides of the mouth at once? How would you know what you could safely consume? WADA requires athletes to take drug tests at any time during competition and in the off season. Plus, WADA goes overboard in determining which substances to ban. No athlete would risk eating anything that could disqualify them from competition; but what of the Chinese people? You could make the argument that since WADA overcautiously bans substances it's not something to get overly worried about, but that's as simplistic as WADA's approach; but in the opposite direction. My concern isn't xenophobic. The Chinese government is letting down the Chinese people as well as the world's population. China says the USOC is over reacting and that it's safe to eat the local fare, but China isn't very credible and people want to know the things they buy are safe.
The core issue is that the Chinese live in a country that doesn't prevent food adulteration that could have serious health consequences and China regularly exports these foods everywhere. China, seeing a serious threat to their economy has had 130 Chinese food enterprises pledge to improve quality control. That's 130 out of what 12,000 food processors?....120,000 food processors? Unfortunately, not everyone, including Trader Joe's entirely believes them and obviously Trader Joe's doesn't believe the US FDA can adequately regulate these imports to the US.
The melamine, pet food and lead debacle was last year's news, but not much has changed in Chinese business practices. True the Chinese executed the head of their food and drug agency, but that did little to address the problems exposed last year. The US is doing too little in ensuring the safety of Chinese exports. Private business (including Wal Mart and Target) is making their own policy changes in advance of US new restrictions. More to reassure consumers than because they want the extra expense of product testing.
Chinese quality control of food is bad, but drug safety is worse. How would you know if one of these companies produced anything for Merck, Pfizer or Baxter? Where does Novartis or AstraZeneca put their drug manufacturing plants?
For instance, the adulterated heparin (Baxter) coming out of China had a US death toll of 4 two weeks ago. Today it's 21, but the FDA says that some of the 21 people were seriously ill and that they may well have died without receiving the heparin, however, the FDA is continuing their investigation. I am certain that as seriously ill as these people were, their condition was not improved by receiving tainted heparin.
The F.D.A. emphasized that it had yet to identify the root cause of the problem, and that it had not concluded that the Chinese plant was responsible. The agency also said it was investigating two Chinese wholesalers — also called consolidators — that supplied crude heparin to the Chinese plant, Changzhou SPL, as well as those that sold raw ingredients to the consolidators.
The New York Times reported Thursday that at least one of the consolidators received supplies from small, unregulated family workshops that scraped mucous membrane from pig intestines and cooked it, eventually producing a dry substance known as crude heparin.
The situation is unacceptable. The U.S. cannot export accountability for drug safety. The FDA needs to do it's core mission, but in yet another story from the NYT, they report:
The Government Accountability Office recently reported that at its current inspection pace, the F.D.A. would need at least 13 years to inspect every foreign drug plant that exports products to the United States. The office, an independent arm of Congress, also found that the F.D.A.’s computer systems were deficient and it had little idea how many plants had been approved for exports to the United States.
It's clear. We are on our own.