Posted by
Doctor Poddy on Thursday, May 08, 2008 1:11:54 AM
I've been lax on posting due to local brownouts and losing my bookmark to log in.
But over at Bloggernews, I have a series of articles about the Chinese heparin scandals.
People just don't get it.
It's not an accident, and it's not failure to process things or to have paper work that shows the medicine is being manufactured properly.
Nor would an outsider coming to "inspect" the paperwork have prevented it.
You see, the presence of hypresulfated chondroiten in the heparin--and the attempt of the Chinese government to pass blame elsewhere-- was a deliberate criminal act, and the attempt to stonewall or pass the blame suggests that the corruption goes high into the local or even natinal government.
One: the chondroiten was not accidentally added when small shops processed pig intestines o get heparin, because chondroiten is from cartilege, not intestine.
Second, it would have required knowledge of American testing technique to know how the testg was done to assure the proper amount of heparin...once the way of testing was known, the next step would be to search and find a cheap chemical substitute.
Placing antifreeze as a sweetener into cough medicine or lead into toys doesn't require much knowledge --any crooked manufacturer could do that---but knowing that you could add some sulfate sidechains to chondroiten to get past the test does require expertise.
It took sophisticated tests to find out the "contaminent',but once it was identified, further testig showed that some batches had 30% of the false chemical. So this means it was not a "contaminent but a deliberate substitution.
Chinese commenters are also trying to stonewall sayg that only the US had deaths so it must b4e something else, since the false heparin in other countries did not.
However, when heparin is used in dialysis or to keep IV ports open, you use a set dose, meaning that some of the substandard heparin would have resulted in the ports or veins clotting closed.
Since this can happen spontaneously it would take a bit of time to see if it was now more common.
Second, since heparin to anticoagulate a person is usually dosed by lab tests (since dosags varies from person to person) the doctors would just shrug and think that the person needed more heparin...but if you used different batches, where one had a lot of adulteration and the other none, you could again end up with blood clots or bleeding. Again, all of these occur in the best of hands, so doctors would blame themselves or the patient's body for the variation, not the medicine ...but a review of records again could show a variation of the rate of the problems.
Finally, the heparin is not the only medicine involved in Chinese fakery.
The WHO (World Health organization) has already noted up to a million deaths a year from fake or substandard medicines, mainly anti malarials, many from China.
And there have been other poisoned deaths, like the hundreds made sick or dead in Panama from cough medicine containing anti freeze to make it sweet.
Finally, this is probably the tip of the iceburg, as substandard brakes and auto parts are felt to cause many of the deaths from motor vehicle accidents in Nigeria.
As the US companies outsource, they have to realize that they don't just have to worry about substandard articles, but corruption that deliberately substitutes cheaper materials wihout telling anyone.
The fake heparin is only the tip of the iceburg that includes toys, auto parts, and other items.