Friday, February 29, 2008

Heparin production: scraping pig intestines

If you'd asked me about how Chinese Heparin was made for Baxter pharmaceuticals, I wouldn't have thought of this ...
Blood Thinner Might Be Tied to More Deaths - New York Times
...The New York Times reported Thursday that at least one of the consolidators received supplies from small, unregulated family workshops that scraped mucous membrane from pig intestines and cooked it, eventually producing a dry substance known as crude heparin...
...The Chinese heparin market has been in turmoil over the last year, as pig disease has swept through the country, depleting stocks, leading some farmers to sell sick pigs into the market and forcing heparin producers to scramble for new sources of raw material.
As a result, even big companies have been turning increasingly to small village workshops, which are often unsanitary. In interviews this week at some of these workshops, employees told The Times that they had not been inspected by the government....
The GOP sacrificed our regulatory infrastructure to the great God of the Holy Market, who's Hand Invisible punishes all evil and brings the greatest good to the greatest number.

Get Bush and the GOP out of office. Now.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Amen, Alan