More Bad China Stuff (two stories) . . .

May 19, 2007

Poisoned Toothpaste in Panama Is Believed to Be From China

By WALT BOGDANICH and RENWICK McLEAN

Diethylene glycol, a poisonous ingredient in some antifreeze, has been found in 6,000 tubes of toothpaste in Panama, and customs officials there said yesterday that the product appeared to have originated in China.
“Our preliminary information is that it came from China, but we don’t know that with certainty yet,” said Daniel Delgado Diamante, Panama’s director of customs. “We are still checking all the possible imports to see if there could be other shipments.”

Some of the toothpaste, which arrived several months ago in the free trade zone next to the Panama Canal, was re-exported to the Dominican Republic in seven shipments, customs officials said. A newspaper in Australia reported yesterday that one brand of the toothpaste had been found on supermarket shelves there and had been recalled.

Diethylene glycol is the same poison that the Panamanian government inadvertently mixed into cold medicine last year, killing at least 100 people. Records show that in that episode the poison, falsely labeled as glycerin, a harmless syrup, also originated in China.

There is no evidence that the tainted toothpaste is in the United States, according to American government officials.

Panamanian health officials said diethylene glycol had been found in two brands of toothpaste, labeled in English as Excel and Mr. Cool. The tubes contained diethylene glycol concentrations of between 1.7 percent and 4.6 percent, said Luis Martínez, a prosecutor who is looking into the shipments.

Health officials say they do not believe the toothpaste is harmful, because users spit it out after brushing, but they nonetheless took it out of circulation.

Mr. Martínez said at a recent news conference that the toothpaste lacked the required health certificates and had entered the market mixed in with products intended for animal consumption.
He said laboratory tests had found up to 4.6 percent diethylene glycol in tubes of Mr. Cool toothpaste. The Excel brand had 2.5 percent.

Miriam Rodríguez, a spokeswoman for the Health Ministry, said she knew of no one who had become sick from using the toothpaste.

Doug Arbesfeld, a spokesman for the United States Food and Drug Administration, said diethylene glycol was not approved for use in toothpaste. Though the F.D.A. has no evidence that the tainted toothpaste slipped into the United States, he added, “We are looking into the situation in Panama.”

Mr. Delgado, the director of Panamanian customs, said the Dominican authorities had been notified to be on the lookout for the suspect toothpaste.

In Panama City, a consumer notified the pharmacy and drugs section of the Health Ministry after seeing that diethylene glycol was listed as an ingredient in toothpaste at a store.

The ministry fined the store $25,000 and ordered it closed for not following proper procedures in putting products up for sale.

The Northern Star, a newspaper in the southeastern Australian city of Lismore, reported yesterday on its Web site that the Excel brand of toothpaste had been found in a chain of supermarkets and taken off the shelves immediately.

Two weeks ago, The New York Times reported that a Chinese factory not certified to make pharmaceutical ingredients had sold 46 barrels of syrup containing diethylene glycol that had been falsely labeled as 99.5 percent pure glycerin. That syrup passed through several trading companies before ending up in Panama, where it was mixed into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine.

At least 100 people died as a direct result, according to Dimas Guevara, a Panamanian prosecutor who is leading the investigation into the deaths.
Over the years, counterfeiters have found it financially advantageous to substitute diethylene glycol, a sweet-tasting syrup, for its chemical cousin glycerin, which is usually much more expensive.

R. M. Koster contributed reporting from Panama City.

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China grapples with food contamination credibility crisis
By David Barboza
Thursday, May 17, 2007

SHANGHAI: Weeks after tainted Chinese pet food ingredients killed and sickened thousands of dogs and cats in the United States, China faced growing international pressure to prove that its food exports were safe to eat.

But simmering beneath the surface is a thornier problem that worries Chinese officials: how do they assure the world that this is not a nation of counterfeits and that "Made in China" means well-made?

Already, the largest pet food recall in U.S. history has heightened global fears about the quality and safety of Chinese agricultural goods. Now evidence is mounting that China has also exported counterfeit drug ingredients that could undermine the credibility of another of its booming exports.

"This isn't an international crisis yet, but if they don't do something about it quickly, it will be," says David Zweig, a China specialist who teaches at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology. "The question is whether it spills over and 'Made in China' becomes known as 'Buyer Beware.' "

With contamination spreading to meat and fish supplies, some of the biggest U.S. food companies are now lobbying Washington to pressure China to increase its food safety measures.

Kraft, Kellogg and Cargill and other food companies have said that they were reviewing their food safety standards and upgrading equipment.
Their executives worry that another such safety scare involving China could set off a consumer backlash and reverse a trend that has seen big food makers grow increasingly dependent on processed ingredients from developing countries.

Consumers have complained to pet food makers that they want goods that are free of any ingredients from China, according to the Pet Food Institute.

"This is beyond concern," said a long-time U.S. food industry official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "All the major food manufacturers are terrified. They're worried this could lead to the cutting off of imports from China. And where do you think we get 80 percent of our apple juice concentrate?"

At stake for China is more than $30 billion a year in food and drug exports to Asia, North America and Europe.

Experts say that doubts about the quality of Chinese food shipments and China's longstanding reputation for counterfeit goods could also affect other exports if buyers begin to find safety shortfalls or other product faults.

Two weeks ago, Wal-Mart Stores announced a recall of baby bibs made in China after some of those bibs tested positive for high levels of lead.

The overall scare may prompt important changes in China. The former head of the Chinese food and drug regulator is now standing trial in Beijing for accepting bribes and failing to curb a scandalous market in fake and dangerous medicines.

Few trade experts say they believe that the Chinese export boom is going to slow any time soon. But they say that certain industries could face greater challenges because of growing concerns about counterfeiting and fake supplies.

One reason is the pet food case, where U.S. regulators suspect that two Chinese companies intentionally mixed an industrial chemical called melamine in with wheat flour to artificially increase protein readings.
"We're now learning some of the dirty secrets behind this fast-growing economy," says Wang Fei Ling, a professor of international affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. "And the dirty secret is they're cutting corners in making things."

In the aftermath of the pet food scare, which may have caused as many as 4,000 animal deaths, regulators around the world are stepping up inspections of Chinese agricultural goods and even blocking some imports.
In Europe, food safety authorities are testing all Chinese protein imports for melamine. One of the largest South Korean food and feed makers, CJ Foods, said last week that it was recalling 42 tons of wheat gluten from China even though the products had not tested positive for melamine.
"The major effect of this seems to me that the Chinese have been alerted that they should get their house in order," M.D. Merbis, an economist at the Center for World Food Studies in Amsterdam, said.

Trying to restore confidence in its agricultural exports, China promised earlier this month to overhaul its food safety system and to upgrade its export controls.

Last week, China found two Chinese companies guilty of exporting melamine-contaminated vegetable protein to the United States.
The fallout is affecting a range of Chinese agricultural exporters.
"A Spanish company came to visit us and was planning to buy our product," Sun Hong, chief executive of Sanfu Biochemical Company, a rice protein maker in Hangzhou, said. "We were going to strike a deal at the end of the month. But after what happened in the U.S., they haven't even replied to our e-mail yet."

While China is not particularly well known for its food exports, its shipments of vegetables and seafood have been soaring in recent years.
China is also pressing the United States and the European Union to accept imports of Chinese poultry products, a move that is being opposed by U.S. and European poultry farmers.

To restore confidence in its food exports, experts say, China needs to confront the issue and not be seen as covering up or delaying the release of information, which is what appeared to happen when Severe Acute Respiratory Disease and bird flu reached the country.

The pet food case, they say, is much the same. In the days following the U.S. pet food recall, for instance, China denied having shipped any wheat gluten to the United States. One official even said that melamine could not have harmed pets.

Only after an international storm surrounded the case in mid-April, and a U.S. senator publicly rebuked China for its response, did China fully cooperate with U.S. regulators.

Now, in what appears to be a sharp turnabout, China has banned melamine from food and feed proteins and announced nationwide inspections.

Still, doubts remain about the ability of Beijing to tackle what many experts see as rampant fraud in its booming economy, and a culture of counterfeiting.

This is a country, after all, where lax regulation and a weak legal system have allowed unscrupulous entrepreneurs to blend industrial fluids into alcoholic beverages, to sell fake baby formula and to form counterfeiting factories that pump out everything from fake car parts to copycat cigarettes.

Few things, though, are as dangerous as fake food and drugs. In Panama, more than 100 people have died in recent years by consuming counterfeit drug ingredients that were manufactured in a Chinese factory.
The problems here are compounded by the lack of press freedoms that keep the public in the dark about the food and drug safety woes of the country, experts say.

Most people in China are still unaware of the pet food scandal because the story has largely been ignored by the Chinese media.

Several Chinese editors contacted in recent weeks said that they were ordered by the government propaganda department not to report on the case.

"This has been a key," Steve Tsang, who teaches at Oxford University, said. "The government has the ability to censor and manage the flow of the news."

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Junkman said:

I am prepared to send an email message to Kraft, Kellogg and Cargill, stating that if they are using any products that are manufactured in China in any of the products that they sell, I will not purchase anything that they make. I am certain that if enough people were to do this, they would take notice and stop the practice.

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PBinWA said:

"All the major food manufacturers are terrified. ... where do you think we get 80 percent of our apple juice concentrate?"

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