Product Quality Problems in China

Great post from this site. Fake Medicine, Food & Toothpaste By Pamela Jean June 28, 2007 China is rapidly becoming known for faking its food. Hundreds of cases have been documented. China has been adulterating food destined for the U.S. ports with non-food ingredients. These fake or non-food ingredients can be dangerous and deadly. In two of my previous posts, Counterfeit Food: Simply Profitable, Simply Wrong and Endangered: Best Friends & Homemade Bread, I talked about the tainted and counterfeit foods we are unknowingly importing. Things seem to keep getting worse, not better. Now, some 900,000 tubes of toothpaste containing the chemical used in antifreeze products have been found in hotels, motels, institutions for the mentally ill, hospitals, prisons, discount stores, and juvenile facilities in the U.S. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has finally warned Americans not to use any Chinese-made toothpaste, regardless of the brand. The FDA has issued statements regarding poisoned pet food, tainted fish, and adulterated medicines from China. David Barboza, reporting for The New York Times, explains the wide spread nature of this fake food and fake medicine problem: The incidents are the latest indications that cutting corners or producing fake goods is not just a legacy of China’s initial rush toward the free market three decades ago but still woven into the fabric of the nation’s thriving industrial economy. It is driven by entrepreneurs who are taking advantage of a weak legal system, lax regulations and a business culture where bribery and corruption are rampant.”This is cut-throat market capitalism,” said Wenran Jiang, a specialist in China who teaches at the University of Alberta. “But the question has to be asked: is this uniquely Chinese or is there simply a lack of regulation in the market?” Counterfeiting, of course, is not new to China. Since this country’s economic reforms began to take root in the 1980s, businesses have engineered countless ways to produce everything from fake car parts, cosmetics and brand name bags to counterfeit electrical cables and phony Viagra. Counterfeiting rings are broken nearly every week; nonetheless, the government seems to be waging a losing battle against the operations. Recently, numerous deaths in Panama have been linked to adulterated toothpaste from China. Chinese-made toothpaste has been banned by numerous countries in Asia and the Americas for containing diethylene glycol, or DEG. It is also a low-cost and sometimes deadly substitute for glycerin, a sweetener in many drugs. Now, toothpaste imported from China that was tainted with the poisonous chemical diethylene glycol has been found to be widely distributed in the United States. Officials of the Food and Drug Administration said toothpaste with even small amounts of the bad ingredient, diethylene glycol, a syrupy poison, had a “low but meaningful risk of toxicity and injury” for children and people with kidney or liver disease. “This stuff does not belong in toothpaste, period,” a spokesman for the drug agency, Doug Arbesfeld, said. “No Chinese toothpaste has come into the country since the end of May.” However, this huge problem is not just China’s accountability. Much accountability must lie with both the FDA and Congress. Congress has not passed any laws that require food distributors in the U.S. to label the country of origin. More problematic, our own FDA is woefully incapable of protecting us. Critics say the F.D.A., which bears the bulk of the food-safety load, is underfinanced and understaffed, and they note that fewer than 1 percent of imported food shipments undergo laboratory analysis. The number of food inspectors has decreased in the last five years. For more information about the toothpaste problem, and because I could not distill this information any better than Audra Ang did for the Associated Press, I’m including her article here in its entirety: BEIJING: A government spokesman guaranteed the safety of Chinese exports on Thursday, in a rare direct commentary on rising international fears over Chinese products.Wang Xinpei, a spokesman for the Commerce Ministry, said China “has paid great attention” to the issue, especially food products because it concerns people’s health. “It can be said that the quality of China’s exports all are guaranteed,” Wang told reporters at a regularly scheduled briefing. The statement was among Beijing’s most public assertions of the safety of its exports since they came under scrutiny earlier this year with the deaths of dogs and cats in North America blamed on Chinese wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine. Since then, U.S. authorities have turned away or recalled toxic fish, juice containing unsafe color additives and popular toy trains decorated with lead paint. Chinese-made toothpaste has also been banned by numerous countries in North and South America and Asia for containing diethylene glycol, or DEG, a chemical often found in antifreeze. It is also a low-cost – and sometimes deadly – substitute for glycerin, a sweetener in many drugs. On Wednesday, three Japanese importers recalled millions of Chinese-made travel toothpaste sets, many sold to inns and hotels, after they were found to contain as much as 6.2 percent of diethylene glycol. Wang, the Commerce Ministry spokesman, said Chinese experts have already “explained the situation.” He gave no details, although the country’s quality watchdog has in the past cited tests from 2000 that it said showed toothpaste containing less than 15.6 percent diethylene glycol was harmless to humans. The New York Times reported early Thursday that about 900,000 tubes of tainted Chinese toothpaste have been distributed in the United States, showing up in correctional facilities and some hospitals. Officials in Georgia and North Carolina told The Times that no illnesses had been reported, and that the toothpaste in question was being replaced with brands not manufactured in China. Earlier this month, a spokesman for North Carolina’s Department of Correction said Pacific brand toothpaste was distributed to prisoners who could not afford to buy a name brand at prison stores. The tubes were taken away after trace amounts of DEG was found in them. Also Thursday, state media said Beijing police raided a village where live pigs were force-fed wastewater to boost their weight before slaughter, underscoring the country’s chronic food safety problems. Plastic pipes had been forced down the pigs’ throats and villagers had pumped each 100 kilogram (220 pound) pig with 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of wastewater, the Beijing Morning Post reported. Paperwork showed the pigs were headed for one of Beijing’s main slaughterhouses and stamps on their ears indicated that they had already been through quarantine and inspection, the paper said. Suspects escaped during Wednesday’s raid and no arrests were made, it said. The case underscored China’s chaotic food safety situation, where manufacturers and distributors often use additives that have not been approved, falsify expiration dates or find other ways to cut corners to eke out small profits. Earlier this week, inspectors announced they had closed 180 food factories nationwide in the first half of this year and seized tons of candy, pickles, crackers and seafood tainted with formaldehyde, illegal dyes, and industrial wax. “These are not isolated cases,” Han Yi, an official with the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, was quoted as saying in Wednesday’s state-run China Daily newspaper. Han’s admission was significant because the agency has said in the past that safety violations were the work of a few rogue operators — a claim aimed at protecting China’s billions of dollars of food exports. We have to be alert. We need new laws to hold the government of China accountable. These problems are not limited to toys, medicines, and food. For example, did you know that over 40% of all the tires sold in the U.S. are made in China? If any readers have recently bought tires, it might be worth your while – and your family’s safety – for you to check out this article regarding a recall of over 450,000 tires sold in the U.S. and made in China. Evidently, the tires are unsafe. Its so sad that we can’t trust our food and we can’t trust our government to protect us. Are we becoming a third world country? Our dependency on China, our weakened and underfunded FDA, and our free wheeling trade policies have compounded our food safety problems. It seems that we are standing motionless as we watch our nation roll back a whole century or more of progress.