From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine

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Below are snippets from a much longer article. URL at end to full story.

 

Alobar

 

By WALT BOGDANICH and JAKE HOOKER

Published: May 6, 2007

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

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. "

 

 

 

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.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/world/americas/06poison.html?ei=5087%0A & em= & en\

=d12451fe38bc7c0c & ex=1178596800 & pagewanted=all