Thursday, July 05, 2007

There are still repercussions

From China's business ethics as it tries to take a spot in the world economy:
Panama (AHN) - Another 293 deaths are being investigated in Panama in connection with the 100 patients already dead that were recently confirmed to be due to contaminated medicinal syrup.
Panama officials had exhumed the bodies of victims from 2006 to conduct forensic tests and found that these people had also been killed by the suspected medicines.
Panama's Social Security Fund director was arrested in June for the prior 100 deaths.
On Wednesday, Panamanian prosecutor, Dimas Guevara, told the AP that humans are continuing to die despite the fact that the tainted medicine was pulled from the shelves back in October.
The nearly 300 newly suspected cases have been brought before police by family members, but they have not yet been confirmed by forensic tests, according to Guevara.
The medicinal syrup was found to be contaminated with diethylene glycol dating back to July 2006. This chemical is an industrial solvent commonly found in antifreeze and brake fluid.
The chemical was found not only to be one of the ingredients used in cough syrup, but also antihistamines, calamine lotion, and rash ointments manufactured at a Panamanian government laboratory.
However, investigators found that the chemical was traced back to a Chinese company claiming that it was 99.5 percent pure glycerin, which is a sweetener commonly used to make syrup medicines.
It was also found that China exported more tainted products using the same chemical ingredient in the recent scare that involved toothpaste, which has since been pulled from store shelves.

2 comments:

spocko said...

And we in the US avoided this THIS MUCH (holds fingers together really close).

This is one of the of the direct costs of globalization. In order to sell into the US it isn't good enough that the food be cheap based on cheap labor, the Chinese needed keep cutting corners. Why? Greed? WalMart said they had to cut their prices by 10 percent and they didn't care were it came from?

So will it take a 100 or 200 dead American's until people see this? I used to think so. Now I think that it will require on of the Bush daughters to effected, then maybe something might change.

ellroon said...

What makes you assume the Bush twins eat normal people food anyway?

E.coli, salmonella, mad cow... we will have a few deaths, a flurry of governmental activity and then apathy. This has been going on for years....