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Tue 22 May, 2007 10:21 am
May 22, 2007
China Investigates Contaminated Toothpaste
By DAVID BARBOZA and WALT BOGDANICH
New York Times
DANYANG, China, May 21 ?- Chinese authorities are investigating whether two companies from this coastal region exported tainted toothpaste as more contaminated product, including some made for children, has turned up in Latin America.
A team of government investigators arrived here Sunday afternoon and closed the factory of the Danyang City Success Household Chemical Company, a small building housing about 30 workers in a nearby village, according to villagers and one factory worker. The government also questioned the manager of another toothpaste maker, Goldcredit International Trading, which is in Wuxi, about an hour's drive southeast of here.
No tainted toothpaste has been found in the United States, but a spokesman for the Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that the agency would be taking "a hard look" at whether to issue an import alert.
Authorities in the Dominican Republic said they seized 36,000 tubes of toothpaste suspected of containing diethylene glycol, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze. Included were tubes of toothpaste marketed for children with bubble gum and strawberry flavors sold under the name of "Mr. Cool Junior."
Toothpaste containing the toxic solvent was also found in Panama and Australia in the last week.
Bautista Rojas Gómez, the secretary of health of the Dominican Republic, said the toothpaste, with diethylene glycol listed as an ingredient, was found in stores and warehouses across the country, including near the Haitian border.
Diethylene glycol is the same poison that the Panamanian government unwittingly mixed into cold medicine last year, killing at least 100 people. In that case, the poison falsely labeled as glycerin, a harmless syrup, originated in China, shipping records show. Diethylene glycol is generally less expensive than its chemical cousin glycerin.
Panamanian authorities said they believed the tainted toothpaste found in their country, containing up to 4.6 percent diethylene glycol, came from China.
Executives from both companies under investigation in China denied in interviews on Monday that they had exported any toothpaste containing diethylene glycol to Panama.
"We didn't do this; we didn't make the bad stuff," said Shi Lei, a manager at Danyang City Success. "It was probably someone else."
But Ms. Shi and other toothpaste makers in this region said that diethylene glycol had been used in toothpaste in China for years and that producers believed it was not very harmful.
Government investigators arrived here just days after customs officials in Panama said that they had discovered diethylene glycol in 6,000 tubes of toothpaste. The toothpaste was being sold under the English brand names Mr. Cool and Excel.
There have been no reports of deaths tied to toothpaste containing the chemical.
Dr. Douglas Throckmorton, deputy director for the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the F.D.A., said diethylene glycol levels found in some Panamanian toothpaste was nearly 50 times greater than what is deemed safe. "Kids swallow toothpaste," Dr. Throckmorton said. "That is going to be a concern to you."
Suspicion over China's role in the tainted toothpaste and cold medicine comes just weeks after investigators blamed two Chinese companies for intentionally shipping pet food ingredients contaminated with an industrial chemical to the United States, leading to one of the largest pet food recalls in history. The cases are fueling mounting concerns about the quality and safety of China's food and drug exports and threatening to turn into a trade dispute.
After initially rejecting any Chinese role in the tainted pet food, Beijing officials banned the use of melamine, an industrial chemical used in fertilizer and plastics, from vegetable proteins. Melamine and several related chemicals had been discovered in contaminated pet food ingredients. Chinese officials also promised to overhaul its food safety regulations and tighten export controls.
Indeed, the government seems to have responded quickly to reports last weekend about contaminated toothpaste. Hu Keyu, the manager at Goldcredit International, said investigators had talked to him over the weekend because his company was the first to sell and export toothpaste under the brand label Mr. Cool. But he and his staff insisted that Goldcredit never exported to Panama, and that this year the company had exported only a small amount of Mr. Cool toothpaste to Australia. Goldcredit executives said they did not sell toothpaste under the Excel brand name.
Mr. Hu said his company exports toothpaste, toothbrushes, glue and other goods to the United States, Europe and other regions but that his company no longer uses diethylene glycol. He said, however, that most toothpaste makers in this region use diethylene glycol because it is considered a cheap substitute for glycerin.
"You know, if you're in the export market, the margins are small, so people use the substitute," he said. "Even one percent or half a percent price difference can matter to people here."
Executives from Goldcredit and Danyang said the brand Mr. Cool had been copied by several other companies and that numerous trading companies could be exporting the products.
Danyang City Success Household Chemical, however, said that while it did not export to Panama, it has used diethylene glycol in its toothpaste, and that the government does not have a clear regulation on how much can be added. Danyang City Success is a small company in a village in Danyang, a city whose entrance boasts that it has been designated one of China's "national sanitary" cities for its cleanliness.
Danyang City Success produces both Mr. Cool and Excel and exports toothpaste around the world, including to Europe and Africa, company executives said. But this afternoon, villagers and one young factory worker, who declined to give her name, said that investigators had arrived Sunday night and closed the factory to investigate possible contamination in its exports. Ms. Shi, one of the managers along with her husband, met a reporter at the entrance to the factory and insisted her company had nothing to do with the case in Panama. Inside the gate a team of investigators could be seen meeting with company officials and then departing with a bag of documents. Villagers said the investigators were provincial and local officials, including the village's Communist party secretary.
The sister of the party secretary, who only gave her name as Miss Hu, said Danyang City Success had been around for four or five years and that it was run by a former salesman and his wife, Ms. Shi, who grew up in the village.
"He used to sell packaging materials. Then he saved up his money and started this toothpaste company," she said. "But lately the company has been struggling."
Mr. Hu at Goldcredit said that while he did not produce the toothpaste shipped to Panama, diethylene glycol had been used for years at very low levels in Chinese toothpaste as a glycerin substitute. "If diethylene glycol were poisonous," he said, "all Chinese people would have been poisoned."
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David Barboza reported from Danyang, China, and Walt Bogdanich from New York. R. M. Koster contributed from Panama; Guangming Xu and Rujun Shen contributed from China.
China Finds Poor Quality on Its Store Shelves
July 5, 2007
China Finds Poor Quality on Its Store Shelves
By DAVID BARBOZA
New York Times
SHANGHAI ?- China said on Wednesday that nearly a fifth of the food and consumer products that it checked in a nationwide survey this year were found to be substandard or tainted, underscoring the risk faced by its own consumers even as the country's exports come under greater scrutiny overseas.
Regulators said the broad survey of foods, agricultural tools, clothing, women and children's products and other types of goods turned up sizable quality and safety failure rates for products that are sold domestically.
The government said, for instance, that canned and preserved fruit and dried fish contained excessive bacteria; that 20 percent of the fruit and vegetable juice surveyed was deemed substandard, and that some children's products were defective or laced with harmful chemicals.
The announcement came in the midst of a growing scandal over the quality and safety of Chinese-made exports and follows a series of international recalls involving everything from contaminated pet food ingredients and counterfeit toothpaste to toxic toys, defective tires and contaminated seafood.
The General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said the survey, conducted in the first half of this year, showed quality and safety improvements compared with conditions in the period a year earlier. But the announcement also suggested that Chinese consumers are at serious risk of being harmed by purchasing tainted foods, substandard goods and suspect or defective equipment.
Regulators said, in effect, that goods sold in China were far more hazardous than the exports that were driving the country's economic growth and now partly the subject of safety and quality debates.
Li Yuanping, a regulatory official, told the state-run Xinhua News Agency last month that "99 percent of the food exported to the United States was up to safety standards over the past two years, which is a very high percentage."
But regulators in the United States, Europe and other countries are growing increasingly concerned about quality and safety failures involving Chinese made goods.
Last week, the Food and Drug Administration said it would block certain types of Chinese-made seafood, including shrimp, eel and catfish, from entering the United States unless it was certified to be safe.
American regulators say they were forced to act after witnessing a sharp rise this year in the number of seafood products contaminated with carcinogens or excessive antibiotic residues.
Facing a storm of criticism, China has repeatedly defended the quality and safety of its food and the goods it exports. But regulators have also moved to crack down on fake and poor-quality foods and consumer products.
Nearly every week for the last several months, the government and China's state-controlled media have provided more evidence of how widespread are the quality and safety problems in this country, despite signs of progress in many areas of commerce.
During the last month, regulators and quality inspectors say they have discovered candied fruit with 63 times the permitted amount of sweetener; excessive additives and preservatives in nearly 40 percent of the children's snacks surveyed in western Guangxi province; fake human blood protein at hospitals; and food tainted with formaldehyde, illegal dyes and industrial wax.
Last week, the government even said it had shut about 180 food factories nationwide because of food safety violations. From December to May, regulators said they uncovered 23,000 cases involving fake or low-quality food.
Experts say aggressive and opportunistic entrepreneurs continue to take advantage of the country's chronically weak enforcement of regulations, choosing to blend fake ingredients into products; to sign contracts agreeing to sell one product only to later switch the raw materials for something cheaper; and to doctor, adulterate or even color foods to make them look fresher or more appetizing, when in fact they might be old and stale.
In its report released on Wednesday, the government said 80.9 percent of the food and other products checked in a nationwide survey met safety standards, and that this rate was higher than a year earlier, when about 78 percent of the good surveyed were deemed safe.
The government said that more than 3,000 types of food had been checked nationwide and that thousands of companies were examined.
But regulators offered few details about why certain goods failed the quality and safety standards or how dangerous the products might be.
The government did, however, say baby formula and baby clothing did not meet the safety standards, that animal feed, fertilizer and agricultural equipment were defective and that many food items were mislabeled or heavily colored by additives.
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