Made in China・・・・・again

sandy

Active member
The Telegram

There is an old saying that you get what you pay for — and sometimes, the less you pay, the more you get of things you don’t expect.

North American pets owners have been suffering the results of low prices, in a way they probably would not have expected. Recently, pets became ill after eating pet food made from ingredients including contaminated wheat gluten. The gluten also contained the industrial chemical melamine. The melamine increased the protein measurement of the gluten, even though it was harmful to pets. At least 14 died of kidney problems, while countless more got seriously ill.

The gluten involved came from China, a country where standards and inspection procedures are different and more lax than our own, and subsequently, products can be produced more cheaply.

Watching events unfold, there were probably a fair number of people who thought that North America dodged a bit of a bullet, because at least the contamination involved only pet food: after all, it stands to reason that contaminated base products could end up in the human food system, too.

But the fact is that cheap contaminated products from China have shown up outside that country’s borders and caused serious harm. We just haven’t been paying attention.

There have been large-scale poisonings of humans, as the New York Times reported this weekend.

In Panama, 260,000 bottles of cold medicine were manufactured by that county’s government using drums of glycerin from a small Chinese factory, a shipment of glycerin that had made its way through four different trading companies.

The problem was that the drums did not contain glycerin at all, but instead a cheaper product — the poisonous chemical diethylene glycol, a sweet-tasting solvent that’s less expensive to produce than glycerin, and that is used in toxic products like windshield wash.

By the time the switch was discovered, at least 365 Panamanians had died, and thousands more were seriously injured. Scores died in Bangladesh from the same chemical, once again from a factory in China. A Chinese manufacturer used exactly the same chemical inside China last year, where the chemical was used as a base chemical in five different medicines — Chinese authorities have no figures for the deaths that resulted.

As the Times reported, there have been eight major cases of drug contamination in the last 20 years, killing thousands. In three of the last four cases, the contaminants came from Chinese factories.

One footnote: in the Panamanian case, no person has ever been prosecuted, primarily because authorities maintain the plant involved was never licensed to produce glycerin, so could not be selling a product labelled as glycerin. The Times found Web pages advertising glycerin for sale from the plant.

There is good reason to believe that China is still a low-cost frontier — but it also can suffer from frontier oversight — that is, little to none.

Sometimes, what you pay for is Russian roulette.
http://www.thetelegram.com/index.cfm?sid=28100&sc=80
At least,365・・・・・
I can't imagine how many people・・
 
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