Yesterday was an end to the 14 monster years, the 8 years of dread, the years of environmental decimation, to Rumsfeld and torture and Cheney and …
Damn, it’s a long list.
Good thing Obama has a huge amount of talent to call on ... Gore. Biden. Kerry. Buffet. The Clinton. Obama doesn't come alone, he comes with a superb team and a deep bench.
Somewhere on their to do list is the integrity of the world’s medication and food chain. Fake Heparin, poisonous infant food, poisonous animal feed, counterfeit surgical supplies, toxic toys, -- we've seen 'em all.
Meanwhile the GOP Bush cronies continued to destroy the FDA, the agency that was supposed to protect us from all this.
Fraud in the food and med supply chain has been only one of a non-stop list of disasters falling on pithed America. Ninety percent of Americans still have no idea what's going on; this was one of the many issues that didn't merit campaign attention.
That's over now. No, it's not that Americans have fully woken up. It's that we've dumped the incompetents, and we've engaged the O team.
This TIME story is a reminder of why we need the O team, and why the GOP needs to reform itself. Emphases mine ...
There's even more frightening details in a recent NYT Magazine expose on drug manufacturing in China....China's Melamine Woes Likely to Get orse – TIME
By Austin Ramzy / Beijing Tuesday, Nov. 04, 2008
First, a tainted product emerges, killing some and sickening many more. Its origin is traced to China, where a combination of greed and negligence allow the danger to slip into the food chain...
...As early as January, infants in China raised on Sanlu brand baby formula began developing kidney problems, and parents raised complaints that were ignored by company and local government officials. When the news finally broke in September, tests found four infants had died and more than 60,000 were sickened from formula tainted with melamine.. Expanded inspections found traces of melamine in milk powder from 22 of the country's 109 producers. The substance also showed up in whole milk and dairy products ranging from White Rabbit candies to chocolate used in sex toys in the U.K.
In late October, the scope of the scandal broadened when Hong Kong authorities announced that eggs imported from the mainland also contained melamine, the result of tainted feed given to chickens. Beijing ordered widespread testing of animal feed, and discovered 3,600 tons of contaminated product. The country's agriculture minister, Sun Zhengcai, called the tainted eggs an isolated problem. And the state press trumpeted news that sauces tainted with toxic chemicals were imported from three Japanese factories.
Change some of the details above and you could have the Chinese Product Safety Scandal of 2007. That round was touched off when the death of more than 100 Panamanians was traced back to cough medicine tainted with dietheylene glycol from China. Then hundreds of pets in North America were killed by eating food made from Chinese raw ingredients, also tainted with melamine. As last year's scandal spread, problems were found with Chinese-produced toys, tires, seafood and toothpaste... ...The Chinese embassy in Washington declared that it was "unacceptable for some to launch groundless smear attacks on China" over food and drug safety problems...
The Safety Gap - Can the F.D.A. Ever Hope to Police Chinese Meds? - NYTimes.comIf you're not scared, you're not paying attention.
By GARDINER HARRIS
... China now produces about two-thirds of all aspirin and is poised to become the world’s sole global supplier in the not-too-distant future. But are the Chinese factories safe? Who knows? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency and other competent government regulators rarely, if ever, inspect them...
In China, where thousands of drug manufacturers sell products in the local markets, profit margins are razor thin, and counterfeiting and contamination are common. In 2002, the Pharmaceutical Association, a Chinese trade group, estimated that as much as 8 percent of over-the-counter drugs sold in China are counterfeit.
... China has in recent years exported poisonous toothpaste, deadly dog food, toys made with lead paint and tainted fish. In one infamous example this spring, Chinese manufacturers substituted a cheap fake for the dried pig intestines used to make the drug heparin, which is given to dialysis and surgery patients to prevent blood clotting. As deaths among those taking the drug mounted, the F.D.A. discovered the taint and banned the contaminated drug. In the end, 81 people may have died from allergic reactions, and tens of thousands around the world were exposed to danger. F.D.A. officials admitted that the agency should never have approved the Chinese-made heparin for sale in the United States; the agency, it turned out, had never inspected the Chinese plant making it.
Concerns about Chinese drugs have become so intense that just three weeks ago, the Health and Human Services secretary, Michael O. Leavitt, announced that the F.D.A. would open an office in Beijing by the end of the year and offices in Shanghai and Guangzhou next year. The agency still plans to send inspectors to China from the U.S., but the offices will provide “an infrastructure that will make those people more effective,” Leavitt said at the time of the announcement.
China’s leap to one of the biggest suppliers of pharmaceutical ingredients in the world happened over the last decade, as the Chinese government subsidized the construction of manufacturing plants that have undercut prices everywhere. Generic drug makers in the United States, where price competition is fierce, were the first to seek cheaper drug ingredients in China. Last year, generic drug applications to the F.D.A. listed 1,154 plants providing active pharmaceutical ingredients: 43 percent of them were in China, and another 39 percent were in India. Only 13 percent were in the United States. Branded drug makers, with their fatter profit margins, resisted buying ingredients from China for years, but with their businesses now suffering, even major pharmaceutical companies like AstraZeneca, Bayer, Baxter and Pfizer have announced deals to outsource manufacturing to China.
I have been writing about the drug industry for more than a decade, but I have rarely written about a subject that both branded and generic drug makers wanted to discuss less...
The F.D.A. regulates more than $1 trillion worth of consumer goods, which amounts to about 25 cents of every consumer dollar spent in this country. This includes $466 billion in food sales, $275 billion in drugs, $60 billion in cosmetics and $18 billion in vitamin supplements. The agency is responsible for monitoring a third of all imported goods, from eggplant to eyeliner, microwave ovens to monoclonal antibodies, slaughterhouses to cellphones. But with fewer than 500 import inspectors and computer systems so old that repairmen must be called out of retirement to fix them, the agency is increasingly beset by a sense of futility.
Even the F.D.A.’s staunchest defenders now acknowledge that something is terribly wrong. Among them is Peter Barton Hutt, who served as the agency’s general counsel during the Nixon administration and is widely considered the dean of the F.D.A. bar in Washington. I’ve interviewed Hutt dozens of times over the years, and he has always defended the F.D.A. No more. “This is a fundamentally broken agency,” Hutt told me earlier this year, “and it needs to be repaired.”...
... To ensure the safety of imported drugs, the F.D.A. relies almost entirely on its own inspections of foreign plants. This was not much of a problem 30 years ago, when most medical products consumed in the United States were made here and F.D.A. inspectors could drive around to plants in their district. Most of those plants have since moved abroad, and now decades can pass between inspections. Testifying before Congress in April, Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the F.D.A.’s drug center, spoke with rare frankness about the ability of the agency to do its job abroad. “The F.D.A. of the last century is not configured to regulate this century’s globalized pharmaceutical industry,” she testified.
Other current and former F.D.A. officials I talked to echoed Woodcock’s warning. Tim Wells, who was a field investigator and then a compliance officer for 24 years at the F.D.A., now does private audits of drug plants and sees the holes in the agency’s safety net. “A company I recently visited abroad hasn’t been inspected for 10 years,” he told me.
Besides being more frequent, domestic inspections are unannounced and more intense. And when inspectors find dangerous conditions at domestic plants, they generally return promptly to ensure that those conditions get fixed. Not so in foreign plants. In a report released Oct. 22, government auditors reported that between 2002 and 2007, F.D.A. inspectors found dangerous conditions in 15 foreign plants. Only one of those plants was reinspected within two years, the auditors found. In every other case, the agency took foreign managers at their word that promised changes were made.
The record is particularly bad in China. Over the past six years, the F.D.A. has managed to inspect annually an average of just 15 of the 714 Chinese drug plants that export to the United States. At its present pace, the F.D.A. would need more than 50 years to visit all of these Chinese plants. By contrast, the F.D.A. inspects domestic drug plants every 2.7 years...
... When inspectors do go to China, their reports sometimes read like a bureaucratic rendering of Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad.” During a 2001 trip, for example, two F.D.A. inspectors visited a plant that was exporting acetaminophen to the United States. The plant had never been inspected. “The F.D.A. inspection team was met at the hotel in Wenzhou by representatives from Wenzhou No. 3 Pharmaceutical Factory and . . . transported by public ferry and then company vehicle to the manufacturing facility on Dong Tou Island off the coast of Wenzhou,” their report states. “There is no street address or plot number, and the address of the facility is given only by the county and province.”
Once the team arrived in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, the inspectors learned the drug was being manufactured at another plant — one that once had a similar name but had recently changed it. “In fact,” the report continues, “inspection found that there were initially three separate and independent firms operating under the names Wenzhou No. 1 Pharmaceutical Factory, Wenzhou No. 2 Pharmaceutical Factory and Wenzhou No. 3 Pharmaceutical Factory. The location of Wenzhou No. 1 Pharmaceutical Factory was also determined by the F.D.A. inspection team during the visit to Wenzhou, and it was learned that the firm is operating under a new Chinese name; however, the English translation of that name was not available.” So the two inspectors flew back to the United States — at taxpayers’ expense — never having inspected a thing.
The F.D.A.’s apparent inability to keep names straight is no trivial matter. One reason the agency failed to inspect the Changzhou plant that produced deadly heparin, for instance, was that someone mixed up the facility’s name and concluded that the plant had already been inspected. Chinese plant names, a vestige of its once strictly controlled economy, are often very similar, and translations can vary. For instance, there are 57 separate drug master files — the basic F.D.A. record of a plant’s name, location and approved product — with “Shanghai” in the name. Some are obvious repeats, like the ones for “Shanghai No. 6 Pharmaceutical Factory” and “Shanghai Number 6 Pharmaceutical Factory.” But others could be separate plants. Or maybe not. It’s just too hard to tell.
Compounding the problem is the F.D.A.’s antiquated technology. Its computer systems are so awful that officials have no way of knowing which names, or which plants, are real. To determine which factories need to be inspected, agency investigators must consult two incompatible databases, one of which lists 3,000 foreign drug plants exporting to the United States and the other 6,800. Which number is right? Nobody really knows. Officials have told House investigators that their best guess for the number of foreign drug plants exporting to the United States is 2,967, while the Government Accountability Office recently guessed 3,249. Neither can the agency tell in many cases when the plants were last inspected (or, more important, which have never been inspected), where they are located or what products they make.
The combined ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach receive about 45 percent of all ship-borne trade that comes to the United States, or some 5.2 million containers a year. When I visited one day in May, giant cranes were unloading and loading more than 30 ships, each bearing about 2,500 containers. Some 40 to 50 of those containers — a tiny fraction of the total — were trucked to a gigantic warehouse about a half-mile from the ports. There the F.D.A. and Customs and Border Protection cracked open shipping containers that they considered suspicious and then emptied the containers into a large examination area in front of the bays, arranging the boxes and crates as if they were pathologists lining up organs from an autopsy.
Just about every crate I saw contained some kind of food product. One crate came from Indonesia, and its manifest said it contained products with chicken inside. Indonesia plus chicken suggests avian flu to F.D.A. officials. So they decided to take a look. The crate turned out to contain chicken seasoning, but no actual chicken. Still, the cans were sent off for testing. Deeper into the guts of the container were glass jars of sambal terasi, a hot sauce. They would probably be sent back because the F.D.A. requires makers of low-acid foods in jars or cans to register with the agency.
The labels on high-end olives from Italy were lacking the required nutritional information, so back to Italy they went. Jars of jam made of figs and tangerines indicated they were produced close to Ukraine, so an F.D.A. inspector said that he wanted to sample the product for radioactive fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster...
... This year, 18.2 million shipments of food, devices, cosmetics and drugs are expected to enter more than 300 U.S. ports; the F.D.A. had 454 investigators in 2007 — one and a half per port — to scrutinize them. ...
... the U.S. Justice Department announced that it had opened a criminal investigation of Ranbaxy, the largest Indian drug maker, with $390 million in annual sales in the United States. In a motion filed in federal court in Maryland, the Justice Department accused Ranbaxy of “a pattern of systemic fraudulent conduct,” including filing fabricated drug data to the F.D.A. and using drug ingredients from unapproved and uninspected plants. AIDS drugs purchased by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief were among the medicines implicated, the Justice Department charged. ..
... Officer James Ng of Customs and Border Protection started the tour by putting a package from China through an X-ray machine. The pictures showed row upon row of vials. “When it looks like this, it’s usually anabolic steroids inside,” Ng said. He opened the box, put on a pair of half-glasses and took out one of the vials, which was filled with a white crystalline powder. “It says it’s testosterone,” Ng said and then handed the vial to von Eschenbach.
“It’s an incredible example,” von Eschenbach said, his eyes bright. “It’s a steroid from China, but the label is written in Spanish.”
Customs seizes any steroids and narcotics they find, but they give other drugs to F.D.A. inspectors, who laboriously fill out handwritten forms and send letters to intended recipients. If the recipient swears that the drugs are for his or her own personal use, the F.D.A. often releases the detained package. It takes an hour or two to process each package, “an obstacle that makes their job functionally impossible,” according to a 2003 Congressional investigation. Thousands of packages can pile up waiting for F.D.A. review, and the agency often releases packages without any investigation for lack of staff.
Even when there are inspectors on the job, they cannot be sure every ingredient in a medicine is safe. The F.D.A. confines nearly all of its regulations and much of its inspection oversight to the active part of most pills, which generally constitutes between 1 percent and 10 percent of a pill’s volume. Much of a pill is fillers, binders, coatings, colorants and lubricants that are almost entirely unregulated.
The syrup in which cough and fever medicines are delivered has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world in the past two decades, with three of the four most recent cases originating in China. Hundreds died in Panama in 2006, at least 88 children in Haiti died in 1995 and 1996 and some 30 infants died in India in 1998 — all from toxic syrup. In 1937, 107 people in the United States died because of similar toxic syrup. In fact, it was this incident that led to the creation of the modern F.D.A. But plants making fillers and other nondrug ingredients of pills and syrups are rarely, if ever, inspected by the F.D.A. or any other regulatory agency...
... Unlike reforming Social Security or health insurance generally, fixing the F.D.A. won’t mean allocating enormous sums or necessitate reconceiving the system. It just requires some money and will. There are already legislative changes in the works. Bills now circulating on Capitol Hill would require food, medical- device and drug makers to pay annual registration fees to the F.D.A. Those fees would be used to allow as many inspections of foreign firms as domestic ones.
There also seems to be agreement that our regulatory agencies can’t rely on China to police its own factories.
More inspectors will certainly help, but even regular inspections of Chinese plants cannot ensure safety. Inspectors can be hoodwinked; tests can be fooled. “No matter how many F.D.A. inspections they do,” says Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, “our safety is still at risk if the pressure continues to cut costs.” Brown has introduced a bill to require labels disclosing the source country of key drug ingredients. Some lawmakers have gone as far as to suggest a ban on all drugs made with Chinese ingredients, but China has become such a crucial supplier that a ban would lead to the collapse of the U.S. health care system. And our dependence is only growing: when PricewaterhouseCoopers cited the best place for pharmaceutical outsourcing in the world in an October report to drug companies, its pick was China...
Bush and the GOP descendants of the Gingrich invasion destroyed the FDA.
Destroyed it, because, of course, the libertarian market deity is supposed to solve these problems.
It's been a damned long 14 years.
Now we have Team O. Their mission is to ...
1. Find someone with deep pockets and resources along the supply chain who can be assigned legal responsibility. Let them be reimbursed appropriately.There are good people at the FDA. A sane leader will find much support.
2. We need a to be able to enter the NDC code for any drug in an FDA web site and get a full report on where the ingredients come from. Few consumers will ever do this, but the lawyers will love it and it will introduce supply chain transparency.
3. We need China to be strong, happy, and prosperous. We also need safe medications. If that means our inspectors live in Chinese plants (and get rich for their hardships), then we put tariffs on the production of those plants to pay for the inspectors.
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