Black People : More Poison Toys from China

Ankhur

Well-Known Member
REGISTERED MEMBER
Oct 4, 2009
14,325
2,956
Brooklyn
Occupation
owner of various real estate concerns
ONE CAN ONLY IMAGINE HOW MUCH OF THIS CRAP WINDS UP IN THE DOLLAR STORES IN OUR COMMUNITIES AND IN OUR MARKETS ALL OVER THE AFRICAN CONTINENT

Popular Kids’ Trinkets Loaded with Toxic Metal
Barred from using lead, Chinese makers using more dangerous cadmium
by Justin Pritchard

LOS ANGELES - Barred from using lead in children's jewelry because of its toxicity, some Chinese manufacturers have been substituting the more dangerous heavy metal cadmium in sparkling charm bracelets and shiny pendants being sold throughout the United States, an Associated Press investigation shows.

This Rudolph charm, sold at a Dollar N More store, consisted of up to 90 percent cadmium, lab tests found. Tony Dejak / AP
The most contaminated piece analyzed in lab testing performed for the AP contained a startling 91 percent cadmium by weight. The cadmium content of other contaminated trinkets, all purchased at national and regional chains or franchises, tested at 89 percent, 86 percent and 84 percent by weight. The testing also showed that some items easily shed the heavy metal, raising additional concerns about the levels of exposure to children.

Cadmium is a known carcinogen. Like lead, it can hinder brain development in the very young, according to recent research.

Children don't have to swallow an item to be exposed - they can get persistent, low-level doses by regularly sucking or biting jewelry with a high cadmium content.

To gauge cadmium's prevalence in children's jewelry, the AP organized lab testing of 103 items bought in New York, Ohio, Texas and California. All but one were purchased in November or December.

The results: 12 percent of the pieces of jewelry contained at least 10 percent cadmium.

Troubling results for charms
Some of the most troubling test results were for bracelet charms sold at Walmart, at the jewelry chain Claire's and at a dollar store. High amounts of cadmium also were detected in "The Princess and The Frog" movie-themed pendants.

"There's nothing positive that you can say about this metal. It's a poison," said Bruce A. Fowler, a cadmium specialist and toxicologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On the CDC's priority list of 275 most hazardous substances in the environment, cadmium ranks No. 7.

Jewelry industry veterans in China say cadmium has been used in domestic products there for years. Zinc, the metal most cited as a replacement for lead in imported jewelry being sold in the United States, is a much safer and nontoxic alternative. But the jewelry tests conducted for AP, along with test findings showing a growing presence of cadmium in other children's products, demonstrate that the safety threat from cadmium is being exported.

A patchwork of federal consumer protection regulations does nothing to keep these nuggets of cadmium from U.S. store shelves. If the products were painted toys, they would face a recall. If they were industrial garbage, they could qualify as hazardous waste. But since there are no cadmium restrictions on jewelry, such items are sold legally.

While the agency in charge of regulating children's products, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, has cracked down on the dangers posed by lead and products known to have killed children, such as cribs, it has never recalled an item for cadmium - even though it has received scattered complaints based on private test results for at least the past two years.

There is no definitive explanation for why children's jewelry manufacturers, virtually all from China in the items tested, are turning to cadmium. But a reasonable double whammy looms: Cadmium prices have plummeted as factories grasp for substitutes now that lead is heavily regulated under the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008.

That law set a new, stringent standard for lead in children's products: Only the very smallest amount is permissible - no more than 0.0003 percent of the total content. The statute has led manufacturers to drastically reduce lead in toys and jewelry.

The law also contained the first explicit regulation of cadmium, though the standards are significantly less strict than lead and apply only to painted toys, not jewelry.

Stomach test
To determine how much cadmium a child could be exposed to, items are bathed in a solution that mimics stomach acid to see how much of the toxin would leach out after being swallowed.

The jewelry testing for AP was conducted by chemistry professor Jeff Weidenhamer of Ashland University in Ohio, who over the past few years has provided the CPSC with results showing high lead content in products that were later recalled. His lab work for AP assessed how much cadmium was in each item. Overall, 12 of the 103 items each contained at least 10 percent cadmium. Two others contained lower amounts, while the other 89 were clean.

Ten of the items with the highest cadmium content were then run through the stomach acid test to see how much would escape. Although that test is used only in regulation of toys, AP used it to see what hazard an item could pose because unlike the regulations, a child's body doesn't distinguish between cadmium leached from jewelry and cadmium leached from a toy.

"Clearly it seems like for a metal as toxic as cadmium, somebody ought to be watching out to make sure there aren't high levels in items that could end up in the hands of kids," said Weidenhamer.

His test results include:
http://www.commondreams.org/print/51459

 
Mostly everything used by the Western Hemisphere is poison.
Understandably so, in some points of view,
but how many children do you know have died from poison toothpaste?
or Cough medicine?

And whose neighohoods do they usiually wind up in?

May 6, 2007
From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine
By WALT BOGDANICH and JAKE HOOKER

The kidneys fail first. Then the central nervous system begins to misfire. Paralysis spreads, making breathing difficult, then often impossible without assistance. In the end, most victims die.

Many of them are children, poisoned at the hands of their unsuspecting parents.

The syrupy poison, diethylene glycol, is an indispensable part of the modern world, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze.

It is also a killer. And the deaths, if not intentional, are often no accident.

Over the years, the poison has been loaded into all varieties of medicine — cough syrup, fever medication, injectable drugs — a result of counterfeiters who profit by substituting the sweet-tasting solvent for a safe, more expensive syrup, usually glycerin, commonly used in drugs, food, toothpaste and other products.

Toxic syrup has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world in the past two decades. Researchers estimate that thousands have died. In many cases, the precise origin of the poison has never been determined. But records and interviews show that in three of the last four cases it was made in China, a major source of counterfeit drugs.

Panama is the most recent victim. Last year, government officials there unwittingly mixed diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine — with devastating results. Families have reported 365 deaths from the poison, 100 of which have been confirmed so far. With the onset of the rainy season, investigators are racing to exhume as many potential victims as possible before bodies decompose even more.

Panama’s death toll leads directly to Chinese companies that made and exported the poison as 99.5 percent pure glycerin.

Forty-six barrels of the toxic syrup arrived via a poison pipeline stretching halfway around the world. Through shipping records and interviews with government officials, The New York Times traced this pipeline from the Panamanian port of Colón, back through trading companies in Barcelona, Spain, and Beijing, to its beginning near the Yangtze Delta in a place local people call “chemical country.”

The counterfeit glycerin passed through three trading companies on three continents, yet not one of them tested the syrup to confirm what was on the label. Along the way, a certificate falsely attesting to the purity of the shipment was repeatedly altered, eliminating the name of the manufacturer and previous owner. As a result, traders bought the syrup without knowing where it came from, or who made it. With this information, the traders might have discovered — as The Times did — that the manufacturer was not certified to make pharmaceutical ingredients.

An examination of the two poisoning cases last year — in Panama and earlier in China — shows how China’s safety regulations have lagged behind its growing role as low-cost supplier to the world. It also demonstrates how a poorly policed chain of traders in country after country allows counterfeit medicine to contaminate the global market.

Last week, the United States Food and Drug Administration warned drug makers and suppliers in the United States “to be especially vigilant” in watching for diethylene glycol. The warning did not specifically mention China, and it said there was “no reason to believe” that glycerin in this country was tainted. Even so, the agency asked that all glycerin shipments be tested for diethylene glycol, and said it was “exploring how supplies of glycerin become contaminated.”

China is already being accused by United States authorities of exporting wheat gluten containing an industrial chemical, melamine, that ended up in pet food and livestock feed. The F.D.A. recently banned imports of Chinese-made wheat gluten after it was linked to pet deaths in the United States.

Beyond Panama and China, toxic syrup has caused mass poisonings in Haiti, Bangladesh, Argentina, Nigeria and twice in India.

In Bangladesh, investigators found poison in seven brands of fever medication in 1992, but only after countless children died. A Massachusetts laboratory detected the contamination after Dr. Michael L. Bennish, a pediatrician who works in developing countries, smuggled samples of the tainted syrup out of the country in a suitcase. Dr. Bennish, who investigated the Bangladesh epidemic and helped write a 1995 article about it for BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, said that given the amount of medication distributed, deaths “must be in the thousands or tens of thousands.”

“It’s vastly underreported,” Dr. Bennish said of diethylene glycol poisoning. Doctors might not suspect toxic medicine, particularly in poor countries with limited resources and a generally unhealthy population, he said, adding, “Most people who die don’t come to a medical facility.”

The makers of counterfeit glycerin, which superficially looks and acts like the real thing but generally costs considerably less, are rarely identified, much less prosecuted, given the difficulty of tracing shipments across borders. “This is really a global problem, and it needs to be handled in a global way,” said Dr. Henk Bekedam, the World Health Organization’s top representative in Beijing.

Seventy years ago, medicine laced with diethylene glycol killed more than 100 people in the United States, leading to the passage of the toughest drug regulations of that era and the creation of the modern Food and Drug Administration.

The F.D.A. has tried to help in poisoning cases around the world, but there is only so much it can do.

When at least 88 children died in Haiti a decade ago, F.D.A. investigators traced the poison to the Manchurian city of Dalian, but their attempts to visit the suspected manufacturer were repeatedly blocked by Chinese officials, according to internal State Department records. Permission was granted more than a year later, but by then the plant had moved and its records had been destroyed.

“Chinese officials we contacted on this matter were all reluctant to become involved,” the American Embassy in Beijing wrote in a confidential cable. “We cannot be optimistic about our chances for success in tracking down the other possible glycerine shipments.”

In fact, The Times found records showing that the same Chinese company implicated in the Haiti poisoning also shipped about 50 tons of counterfeit glycerin to the United States in 1995. Some of it was later resold to another American customer, Avatar Corporation, before the deception was discovered.

“Thank God we caught it when we did,” said Phil Ternes, chief operating officer of Avatar, a Chicago-area supplier of bulk pharmaceuticals and nonmedicinal products. The F.D.A. said it was unaware of the shipment.

In China, the government is vowing to clean up its pharmaceutical industry, in part because of criticism over counterfeit drugs flooding the world markets. In December, two top drug regulators were arrested on charges of taking bribes to approve drugs. In addition, 440 counterfeiting operations were closed down last year, the World Health Organization said.

But when Chinese officials investigated the role of Chinese companies in the Panama deaths, they found that no laws had been broken, according to an official of the nation’s drug enforcement agency. China’s drug regulation is “a black hole,” said one trader who has done business through CNSC Fortune Way, the Beijing-based broker that investigators say was a crucial conduit for the Panama poison.

In this environment, Wang Guiping, a tailor with a ninth-grade education and access to a chemistry book, found it easy to enter the pharmaceutical supply business as a middleman. He quickly discovered what others had before him: that counterfeiting was a simple way to increase profits.

And then people in China began to die.

Cheating the System

Mr. Wang spent years as a tailor in the manufacturing towns of the Yangtze Delta, in eastern China. But he did not want to remain a common craftsman, villagers say. He set his sights on trading chemicals, a business rooted in the many small chemical plants that have sprouted in the region.

“He didn’t know what he was doing,” Mr. Wang’s older brother, Wang Guoping, said in an interview. “He didn’t understand chemicals.”

But he did understand how to cheat the system.

Wang Guiping, 41, realized he could earn extra money by substituting cheaper, industrial-grade syrup — not approved for human consumption — for pharmaceutical grade syrup. To trick pharmaceutical buyers, he forged his licenses and laboratory analysis reports, records show.

Mr. Wang later told investigators that he figured no harm would come from the substitution, because he initially tested a small quantity. He did it with the expertise of a former tailor.

He swallowed some of it. When nothing happened, he shipped it.

One company that used the syrup beginning in early 2005 was Qiqihar No. 2 Pharmaceutical, about 1,000 miles away in Heilongjiang Province in the northeast. A buyer for the factory had seen a posting for Mr. Wang’s syrup on an industry Web site.

After a while, Mr. Wang set out to find an even cheaper substitute syrup so he could increase his profit even more, according to a Chinese investigator. In a chemical book he found what he was looking for: another odorless syrup — diethylene glycol. At the time, it sold for 6,000 to 7,000 yuan a ton, or about $725 to $845, while pharmaceutical-grade syrup cost 15,000 yuan, or about $1,815, according to the investigator.

Mr. Wang did not taste-test this second batch of syrup before shipping it to Qiqihar Pharmaceutical, the government investigator said, adding, “He knew it was dangerous, but he didn’t know that it could kill.”

The manufacturer used the toxic syrup in five drug products: ampules of Amillarisin A for gall bladder problems; a special enema fluid for children; an injection for blood vessel diseases; an intravenous pain reliever; and an arthritis treatment.

In April 2006, one of southern China’s finest hospitals, in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, began administering Amillarisin A. Within a month or so, at least 18 people had died after taking the medicine, though some had already been quite sick.

Zhou Jianhong, 33, said his father took his first dose of Amillarisin A on April 19. A week later he was in critical condition. “If you are going to die, you want to die at home,” Mr. Zhou said. “So we checked him out of the hospital.” He died the next day.

“Everybody wants to invest in the pharmaceutical industry and it is growing, but the regulators can’t keep up,” Mr. Zhou said. “We need a system to assure our safety.”

The final death count is unclear, since some people who took the medicine may have died in less populated areas.

In a small town in Sichuan Province, a man named Zhou Lianghui said the authorities would not acknowledge that his wife had died from taking tainted Amillarisin A. But Mr. Zhou, 38, said he matched the identification number on the batch of medicine his wife received with a warning circular distributed by drug officials.

“You probably cannot understand a small town if you are in Beijing,” Zhou Lianghui said in a telephone interview. “The sky is high, and the emperor is far away. There are a lot of problems here that the law cannot speak to.”

The failure of the government to stop poison from contaminating the drug supply caused one of the bigger domestic scandals of the year. Last May, China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, ordered an investigation of the deaths, declaring, “The pharmaceutical market is in disorder.”

At about the same time, 9,000 miles away in Panama, the long rainy season had begun. Anticipating colds and coughs, the government health program began manufacturing cough and antihistamine syrup. The cough medicine was sugarless so that even diabetics could use it.

The medicine was mixed with a pale yellow, almost translucent syrup that had arrived in 46 barrels from Barcelona on the container ship Tobias Maersk. Shipping records showed the contents to be 99.5 percent pure glycerin.

It would be months and many deaths later before that certification was discovered to be pure fiction.

A Mysterious Illness

Early last September, doctors at Panama City’s big public hospital began to notice patients exhibiting unusual symptoms.

They initially appeared to have Guillain-Barré syndrome, a relatively rare neurological disorder that first shows up as a weakness or tingling sensation in the legs. That weakness often intensifies, spreading upward to the arms and chest, sometimes causing total paralysis and an inability to breathe.

The new patients had paralysis, but it did not spread upward. They also quickly lost their ability to urinate, a condition not associated with Guillain-Barré. Even more unusual was the number of cases. In a full year, doctors might see eight cases of Guillain-Barré, yet they saw that many in just two weeks.

Doctors sought help from an infectious disease specialist, Néstor Sosa, an intense, driven doctor who competes in triathlons and high-level chess.

Dr. Sosa’s medical specialty had a long, rich history in Panama, once known as one of the world’s unhealthiest places. In one year in the late 1800s, a lethal mix of yellow fever and malaria killed nearly 1 in every 10 residents of Panama City. Only after the United States managed to overcome those mosquito-borne diseases was it able to build the Panama Canal without the devastation that undermined an earlier attempt by the French.

The suspected Guillain-Barré cases worried Dr. Sosa. “It was something really extraordinary, something that was obviously reaching epidemic dimensions in our hospital,” he said.

With the death rate from the mystery illness near 50 percent, Dr. Sosa alerted the hospital management, which asked him to set up and run a task force to handle the situation. The assignment, a daunting around-the-clock dash to catch a killer, was one he eagerly embraced.

Several years earlier, Dr. Sosa had watched as other doctors identified the cause of another epidemic, later identified as hantavirus, a pathogen spread by infected rodents.

“I took care of patients but I somehow felt I did not do enough,” he said. The next time, he vowed, would be different.

Dr. Sosa set up a 24-hour “war room” in the hospital, where doctors could compare notes and theories as they scoured medical records for clues.

As a precaution, the patients with the mystery illness were segregated and placed in a large empty room awaiting renovation. Health care workers wore masks, heightening fears in the hospital and the community.

“That spread a lot of panic,” said Dr. Jorge Motta, a cardiologist who runs the Gorgas Memorial Institute, a widely respected medical research center in Panama. “That is always a terrifying thought, that you will be the epicenter of a new infectious disease, and especially a new infectious disease that kills with a high rate of death, like this.”

Meanwhile, patients kept coming, and hospital personnel could barely keep up.

“I ended up giving C.P.R.,” Dr. Sosa said. “I haven’t given C.P.R. since I was a resident, but there were so many crises going on.”

Frightened hospital patients had to watch others around them die for reasons no one understood, fearing that they might be next.

As reports of strange Guillain-Barré symptoms started coming in from other parts of the country, doctors realized they were not just dealing with a localized outbreak.

Pascuala Pérez de González, 67, sought treatment for a cold at a clinic in Coclé Province, about a three-hour drive from Panama City. In late September she was treated and sent home. Within days, she could no longer eat; she stopped urinating and went into convulsions.

A decision was made to take her to the public hospital in Panama City, but on the way she stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated. She arrived at the hospital in a deep coma and later died.

Medical records contained clues but also plenty of false leads. Early victims tended to be males older than 60 and diabetic with high blood pressure. About half had been given Lisinopril, a blood pressure medicine distributed by the public health system.

But many who did not receive Lisinopril still got sick. On the chance that those patients might have forgotten that they had taken the drug, doctors pulled Lisinopril from pharmacy shelves — only to return it after tests found nothing wrong.

Investigators would later discover that Lisinopril did play an important, if indirect role in the epidemic, but not in the way they had imagined.

A Major Clue

One patient of particular interest to Dr. Sosa came into the hospital with a heart attack, but no Guillain-Barré-type symptoms. While undergoing treatment, the patient received several drugs, including Lisinopril. After a while, he began to exhibit the same neurological distress that was the hallmark of the mystery illness.

“This patient is a major clue,” Dr. Sosa recalled saying. “This is not something environmental, this is not a folk medicine that’s been taken by the patients at home. This patient developed the disease in the hospital, in front of us.”

Soon after, another patient told Dr. Sosa that he, too, developed symptoms after taking Lisinopril, but because the medicine made him cough, he also took cough syrup — the same syrup, it turned out, that had been given to the heart patient.

“I said this has got to be it,” Dr. Sosa recalled. “We need to investigate this cough syrup.”

The cough medicine had not initially aroused much suspicion because many victims did not remember taking it. “Twenty-five percent of those people affected denied that they had taken cough syrup, because it’s a nonevent in their lives,” Dr. Motta said.

Investigators from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who were in Panama helping out, quickly put the bottles on a government jet and flew them to the United States for testing. The next day, Oct. 11, as Panamanian health officials were attending a news conference, a Blackberry in the room went off.

The tests, the C.D.C. was reporting, had turned up diethylene glycol in the cough syrup.

The mystery had been solved. The barrels labeled glycerin turned out to contain poison.

Dr. Sosa’s exhilaration at learning the cause did not last long. “It’s our medication that is killing these people,” he said he thought. “It’s not a virus, it’s not something that they got outside, but it was something we actually manufactured.”

A nationwide campaign was quickly begun to stop people from using the cough syrup. Neighborhoods were searched, but thousands of bottles either had been discarded or could not be found.

As the search wound down, two major tasks remained: count the dead and assign blame. Neither has been easy.

A precise accounting is all but impossible because, medical authorities say, victims were buried before the cause was known, and poor patients might not have seen doctors.

Another problem is that finding traces of diethylene glycol in decomposing bodies is difficult at best, medical experts say. Nonetheless, an Argentine pathologist who has studied diethylene glycol poisonings helped develop a test for the poison in exhumed bodies. Seven of the first nine bodies tested showed traces of the poison, Panamanian authorities said.

With the rainy season returning, though, the exhumations are about to end. Dr. José Vicente Pachar, director of Panama’s Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, said that as a scientist he would like a final count of the dead. But he added, “I should accept the reality that in the case of Panama we are not going to know the exact number.”

full article;
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/world/americas/06poison.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

Local prosecutors have made some arrests and are investigating others connected to the case, including officials of the import company and the government agency that mixed and distributed the cold medicine. “Our responsibilities are to establish or discover the truth,” said Dimas Guevara, the homicide investigator guiding the inquiry.
 

Donate

Support destee.com, the oldest, most respectful, online black community in the world - PayPal or CashApp

Latest profile posts

HODEE wrote on Etophil's profile.
Welcome to Destee
@Etophil
Destee wrote on SleezyBigSlim's profile.
Hi @SleezyBigSlim ... Welcome Welcome Welcome ... :flowers: ... please make yourself at home ... :swings:
Back
Top