The New York Times yesterday had a front page story about how the Chinese government had failed to inspect a plant that was making a component of tained Heprin, a blood thinner, that had been imported to the US. The company was registered as a "chemical" company and not a "drug" company and so fell through the regulatory cracks.
Three Americans are now dead and hundreds sickened as a result of the bungling.
But, turns out, our FDA is also to blame. They are supposed to be inspecting foreign drug manufacturing facilities every 2 years. How often have they actually been doing it? Every 12 years. They never inspected the plant and at the current rate, it will take some 50 years for them to inspect the plants in China they are required to under their regulations.
Who will be held accountable? Last July, in the wake of that toothpaste and toy scandal, China EXECUTED the guy who was in charge of the FDA equivalent. The manager of one of the Chinese toy manufacturers hanged himself. The officials in charge this time have to be quaking in their loafers.
In contrast, I would venture a guess that no one at FDA will lose their job over this. Let's just say that Michael Brown has started his own firm doing disaster consulting.
We have got to step up our regulation of imports. It is foolish to rely on China which established a legal system less than 30 years ago.
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Dear Nina,
I commend you for your concern about China's laxity, and for your outrage at the failure of the FDA to regulate a Chinese entity from the swamplands of the District of Columbia. Perhaps you can also work up a bit of concern about the human collagens collected from freshly executed Chinese convicts, processed and sold to eager European cosmetics firms.
It would be highly interesting to know about the pipeline from Chinese processing facilities, to those European firms and the consumers who use their products.
One wonders if the plumped lips of celebrities seeking to retain their youthful aspect owe their allure to the vital connective tissues of some hapless citizen of the People's Republic who maybe was delinquent in retiring some library fines.
Poor thing.
A tragic miscalculation of residence, since last I checked, Alameda County public library assesses no fines for overdue books.
Come to think of it, if your former boss had done his inadvertant stuffing of classified documents into his unawares in the Alameda Library, he could have scampered away without any fine or stern warnings at all.
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