Bismarck and Mother's Day

If Bismarck's mother had not sent him to a boarding school at age 6, would we have avoided WW II and possibly even WW I?

In Our Time reviewed the Iron Chancellor a few months back. I was left with the impression of a very talented and not particularly evil man who set up Germany and the world for colossal tragedy. If he'd had more mental flexibility, fewer internal demons he couldn't shake, less insecurity at the core of his massive confidence, could Germany have taken a far healthier route to modernity?

Boarding school at age 6 is not a good idea. Thus does one mother's personal error have non-trivial consequences. A thought my wife will doubtless treasure come Mother's Day ...

PS. Liberate In Our Time!

Experiments in employment: DoMyStuff

This will be most interesting when you're able to hire a very smart person from a nation where a good wage is $5/day.

Website Does Your Stuff

... DoMyStuff.com is as entertaining as it is easy to use. Unlike the other legitimate Work-at-Home web sites, DoMyStuff.com allows posting of the old-fashioned, “gal-Friday” type of jobs. From grocery shopping to laundry, babysitting to mowing the lawn, changing the oil to arranging a party, you’ll see it on DoMyStuff.com...

The fallacy of delayed retirement

This data is consistent with they hypothesis that, for the average American, functional decision making deteriorates after about age 53:

Marginal Revolution: Eight more years to go

....The sophistication of financial decisions varies with age: middle-aged adults borrow at lower interest rates and pay fewer fees compared to both younger and older adults. We document this pattern in ten financial markets. The measured effects can not be explained by observed risk characteristics. The sophistication of financial choices peaks at about age 53 in our cross-sectional data. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that financial sophistication rises and then falls with age, although the patterns that we observe represent a mix of age effects and cohort effects....

It's a long downhill ride to age 68.

Unless we can find a way to slow the natural Alzheimer's process, we should expect the employment situation and income of the average non-"tenured" workers [1] to deteriorate after age 55. Remember that the next time you read about how baby boomers will work so much longer than their parents ...

On the upside, I'm betting that today's 30 yo will be on preventive meds by the time they're 45 -- they may well be able to work into their 70s.

[1] Tenure as in academia, but also the "tenure" of senior executives who are no longer "at will" employees.

Geeks crush DMCA

The aggregate geek mind is on the war path. Yesterday tatoos and color coded t-shirts were used to protest the ownership of a 128 bit integer, now geeks are using the DMCA to seize personal control of other digits.

Slashdot | Own Your Own 128-Bit Integer

.... the folks at Freedom to Tinker would like to point out that you too can own your own integer. They've set up a script that will generate a random number, encrypt a copyrighted haiku with it, and then deed the number back to you. You won't get a copyright on the number or the haiku, but your number has become an illegal circumvention device under the DMCA, such that anyone subject to US law caught distributing it can be punished under the DMCA's anti-trafficking section, for which the DMCA's Safe Harbor provisions do not apply.

Alas the server is a cooling puddle of liquid metal. Try it in a few days ...

Money and software features

CH wrote a nice post on programming quotes (you have to read his bleak favorite), including one from Larry Wall about buying things:

Coding Horror - a Larry Wall quote

...I think that the biggest mistake people make is latching onto the first idea that comes to them and trying to do that. It really comes to a thing that my folks taught me about money. Don't buy something unless you've wanted it three times. Similarly, don't throw in a feature when you first think of it. Think if there's a way to generalize it, think if it should be generalized. Sometimes you can generalize things too much. I think like the things in Scheme were generalized too much. There is a level of abstraction beyond which people don't want to go. Take a good look at what you want to do, and try to come up with the long-term lazy way, not the short-term lazy way...

Great advice for software, but even better advice for spending.

SciAm on the Pet Poisons: chemistry at last

SciAm has a reasonable update, with a bit of science. The headline is misleading; the companies using melanine did not expect it to injure animals -- they didn't really want to get caught.

Were Our Pets Deliberately Poisoned?: Scientific American

..."We have found cyanuric acid, which is somewhat related to melamine," says Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine. Both compounds have high levels of nitrogen, which are a measure of protein in a food product. Wheat, rice and corn glutens are forms of vegetable protein that are used as binders in soft (or wet) pet food. They can also be added to dry food to enhance the protein content, says Dave Griffin, owner of the independent pet store Westwood Pet Center in Bethesda, Md. Griffin, who has worked in the pet industry for 35 years, adds that because of lax labeling requirements, pet food manufacturers are not required to specify the source of protein—that is whether it is from meat or meal.

Brent Hoff, a clinical toxicologist and pathologist at the University of Guelph in Ontario, confirmed the presence of cyanuric acid in both the rice protein concentrate as well as in crystals found in the urine and kidneys of sick animals. Late last month, those crystals, which are brown and round in shape, were found to be made up of 30 percent melamine; the composition of the other 70 percent has yet to be determined, although it is known to contain cyanuric acid as well as amilorine and amiloride, which are by-products of melamine.

Cyanuric acid may have been added separately to the feed, however it's also likely it was present because it can result from the bacterial degradation of melamine, says Richard Goldstein, a kidney specialist at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine. Much like melamine, cyanuric acid, which is typically used in chlorination during pool cleaning, is not known to have a high toxicity. "People swallow it all the time" in pool water, Goldstein says. However, he adds, "It does have a toxic effect on the kidneys in very high doses…. Combining it with melamine may cause it to crystallize and hang out in the kidneys a lot longer than normal."

Hoff and his colleagues at Guelph are continuing to analyze the crystals found in sick pets to determine "how close the crystals are to the precipitate [the solid that results when two chemicals react] of melamine and cyanuric acid." For now, though, Hoff cautions, "We haven't got it down pat."

The FDA also announced that it is taking preemptive steps to try to prevent further damage by testing protein ingredients for melamine in a variety of pet and human food, which contains protein additives—like wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate—that are imported from outside the U.S. David Acheson, chief medical officer for the agency's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, says the new measures are to determine "where else may this be" in order to keep the contaminant from sickening any more pets and, perhaps, people as well....

..."As part of this approach," Acheson says, the "FDA and the state authorities are going to raise awareness with manufacturers and processors about the importance of knowing all there is to know about their suppliers." Thus far, contaminated wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate has been discovered in North America, and melamine-containing corn gluten was also used in pet food in South Africa. All of the tainted protein additives have been sourced to Chinese manufacturers...

... The FDA will finally get a shot at getting to the root of the matter now that Chinese officials have relented to requests to allow inspectors into the country to probe gluten suppliers implicated in the potential scandal. The FDA reported that it had finally received letters of invitation from the Chinese government, which are necessary to obtain visas. The agency plans to investigate the manufacturing practices of the two suppliers of the melamine-containing rice and wheat glutens that have been imported by the U.S., to determine if and how cross-contamination may have occurred.

... The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates health and food safety, recommended that the FDA bar the import of grains from China....

So far the FDA hasn't made any significant changes. I don't know if they can without congressional action.

UC advice on surviving a shooter

Schneier links to the PDF. Some excerpts (emphases mine):

• If officers arrive on scene, community members should get out and move toward any Police vehicle when safe to do so while keeping their hands on top of their head and do exactly and immediately what the Police tell you to do.
  
  
• Unless you are very close to an exit, don’t run through a long hall to get to one, you may encounter the gunmen or hostage taker. Don’t hide in restrooms!
  
  
• If they do start shooting people, you need to make a choice, (at this point it is your choice) stay still and hope they don’t shoot you, run for an exit while zig-zaging, or even attack the shooter. This is very dangerous, but certainly no more then doing nothing and dying in place. A moving target is much harder to hit than a stationary one and the last thing that the shooter will expect is to be attacked by an unarmed person...
  

Hands on the head near police. No bathrooms. If he's shooting, move.

I doubt I'll ever need to know this, but ...

Fallows on the Bush attorney scandals - murder suppressed?

Fallows suggests that Bush administration gun politics may have impeded investigation of the murder of Tom Wales, a federal prosecutor. The prime suspect may have been well connected.

Fallows is an establishment journalist. Years ago I'm sure this connection would never have occurred to him, but six years of the worst presidency ever has made everything conceivable.

Incidentally, he mentions the curious timing of a plum job offer and $1.5 million dollar "bonus" that terminated the investigation of another allegedly corrupt GOP congressman. I wonder if Debra Wong Yang could be encouraged to talk to Congress ...

Cho: the system worked, until it didn't

So the system worked. Cho was identified as a danger to himself and others two years ago. Except the system had gaping holes in it. Disaster must have narrowly averted dozens of times, but humans don't learn from averted disasters. We're just not built that way.

We only learn from true disaster, and then we learn as little as possible in the smallest possible domain. It's probably part of how we got through the day in simpler times, but it's an evolutionarily obsolete behavior.

Virginia might fix their system. Will Minnesota's Secretary of Health order a review of our involuntary commitment procedures in light of the Blacksburg tragedy? Probably not, though one can dream.

Somehow we need to do better.

Eta Carinae: no need to worry

Back before the dinosaurs, in a galaxy not so far away, a big star blew. We have similar one nearby ...

Huge star explodes in brightest supernova yet seen | Science | Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A gargantuan explosion ripped apart a star perhaps 150 times more massive than our sun in a relatively nearby galaxy in the most powerful and brightest supernova ever observed, astronomers said on Monday.

... The supernova, designated as SN 2006gy, occurred 240 million light years away in a galaxy called NGC 1260, and was studied using observations from NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory as well as earthbound optical telescopes...

... Astrophysicist Mario Livio said the supernova may have resulted from a type of explosion mechanism that had existed only in theoretical calculations. He said the first generation of stars in the universe may have died in such a manner.

In a normal supernova, the core of a star collapses when it exhausts its fuel, and forms either a neutron star or a black hole, with scant heavy elements blown into space.

But this supernova appears to be the result of the core not collapsing but being obliterated in an explosion blasting all its material into space, the scientists said.

Dave Pooley of the University of California at Berkeley said this star appears similar to Eta Carinae, a star perhaps 100 to 120 times the mass of the sun located 7,500 light years away within the Milky Way. There has not been a supernova in our galaxy in more than 400 years, Pooley said...

... If Eta Carinae were to burst into a supernova, Pooley said, "It would be so bright that you would see it during the day, and you could even read a book by its light at night."...

... "This could happen tomorrow, it could happen 1,000 years from now," Livio said. "Is there a risk to life on Earth as a result of this explosion? Well, not very likely."

Livio said Earth could be affected if there were a gamma ray burst that potentially could harm the atmosphere and life, but the chances of this aiming directly at Earth are slim.

When I read these stories I spare a moment to reflect on whatever was "downwind" from SN 2006gy.

I liked the "slim" comment. Really, I don't need to know how slim. If Eta Carinae's future gamma beam travels our way we're toast. Happily we have far more urgent things to worry about ...

ACE inhibitors and dementia: radiation protection?

These kind of loose association studies are a dime a dozen, and usually misleading. They're digging data obtained for other reasons to look for an association. What makes it interesting, however, is the animal study:

Some heart drugs may slow mental decline with age | Health | Reuters:

... The study found a link between taking these "centrally acting" ACE inhibitors and lower rates of mental decline as measured by the Modified Mini-Mental State Exam...

For each year that subjects were exposed to centrally acting ACE inhibitors that enter the brain, the decline in test results was 50 percent lower than the decline in people taking other kinds of high blood pressure pills...

... Centrally acting ACE inhibitors include captopril (Capoten), fosinopril (Monopril), lisinopril (Prinivil or Zestril), perindopril (Aceon), ramipril (Altace) and trandolapril (Mavik). [jf: several of these are off-patent now]

Sink decided to investigate the effect of centrally acting ACE inhibitors on dementia risk after her Wake Forest colleagues found the drugs protected rats from brain injury due to radiation. She presented her findings May 5 at the American Geriatrics Society's annual meeting in Seattle.

She and her colleagues looked at a subgroup of 1,074 men and women participating in a study of cardiovascular health who were taking drugs to treat hypertension and were dementia-free when the study began.

While the centrally acting ACE inhibitors did slow cognitive decline, as Sink had hypothesized, the non-centrally active ACE inhibitors that don't reach the brain actually boosted the risk of developing dementia by 20 percent, although the effect didn't reach statistical significance....

The radiation protection effect is what made my ears perk up. The rest of this is thin stuff, enough only to justify further work. We do have animal models for dementia, so that is the place to look next. The "risk increase" numbers are probably random error in this type of study.

Trying to locate a science fiction story

I dimply recall reading a science fiction story or tv show whose plot went something like this:

• wealthy eccentric is puzzled by the continued survival of humanity after the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb
  
• wealthy guy employs cynical protagonist (neer do well political scientist with a past) to investigate
• protagonist cynically takes the money, but slowly begins to realize his employer is right -- there's no way humanity should still be around
• protagonist starts to close-in on the conspiracy (aliens of course) but then ...
  

I know "it's out there" :-). Anyone remember reading this? It might be from a long time back ...

Submit comments or just email at jfaughnan@spamcop.net

Disasters that weren't: lessons not learned

Extraordinary heroism spared 1950s Britain from a "China Syndrome" catastrophe:

Damn Interesting: The Windscale Disaster

... Reactor Manager Tom Tuohy– thought to have been exposed to the most radiation during the event– is now in his mid-80s and is living with his wife in the USA. One study conducted in 1987 estimated that as many as thirty-three people may eventually die from cancers as a result of this accident, though the Medical Research Council Committee concluded that "it is in the highest degree unlikely that any harm has been done to the health of anybody, whether a worker in the Windscale plant or a member of the general public." In contrast, Chernobyl caused forty-seven immediate deaths and as many as 9,000 may die from related cancer.

Today, some areas of Cumbria still prompt a few clicks from Geiger counters due to lingering caesium-137 isotopes. While the Windscale reactors have been in the process of being decommissioned since the 1980s, the core of Windscale Pile 1 still contains roughly fifteen tons of warm and highly radioactive uranium, and the cleanup is not expected to finish until 2060.

Ultimately the unnecessary incident could have been avoided with a bit of knowledge from the Manhattan project. Had the American government opted to share the nuclear knowledge which the British had helped to gain, the mishap could have been avoided altogether. Fortunately the foresight of Sir John Cockcroft and the valor of men like Tom Tuohy and Tom Hughes

Tuohy and Hughes exhausted a lifetime supply of heroism in 1957. The article doesn't mention if they ever got any fancy medals, but it's not too late for Tuohy to pick one up ...

I suspect we learn far less from disasters averted than from disasters confirmed. If only we'd had ten thousand more years of cortical evolution before we went singular ...

Phishing and the retreat from the net

I believe fewer "regular folk" rely on the net than was true a few years ago, even as more use it purely for entertainment. I don't think this is a reasoned, conscious decision for most, I think it's more of an instinctive reluctance. I think this is why:

coding horror: phishing ...

... There's only one conclusion you can draw from the study's results: when presented with a spoofed web page, a large percentage of users will always fall for it. Forever.

Once that spoofed page is up, even if we use the extraordinarily optimistic estimate that only 15 percent of users will fall for it, that's still a tremendous number of users at risk. Given the poor statistics, the only mitigation strategy that makes sense is to somehow prevent showing the spoofed page to the user. The good news is that the latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer have anti-phishing capabilities which do exactly that: they use real-time, distributed blacklists to prevent showing known spoof sites to users. I visited the PhishTank site to gather a set of known phishing URLs to see how well these browsers perform.

Firefox may be using PhishTank as a source; every URL I visited showed the most severe warning, blocking the phishing site from the user behind a sort of smoked glass effect. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to click the little red X and use the page. I don't think it's a good idea for this dialog to be so easily dismissable, like any other run of the mill dialog box...

... I'm no fan of distributed blacklists, but I think they're a necessary evil in this case. Throughout the last ten years of incremental browser security improvements, users have always been susceptible to spoof attacks. It doesn't matter how many security warnings we present, or how much security browser chrome we wrap websites in. Phishing is the forever hack. If the phishing page is displayed at all, it invariably reels a large percentage of users in hook, line, and sinker. The only security technique that can protect users from phishing scams, it seems, is the one that prevents them from ever seeing the phishing page in the first place.

I don't think Camino is using a phishing filter yet, and I know Safari isn't. It's a prerequisite now.

More fundamentally, I think we're coming to the end of the first generation of the net. The next version won't be anonymous ...

Poisoned medicine: Even I am stunned.

[updated to include a link to the 2/07 story.]

I've written relentlessly about the Melanine pet food poisoning for four reasons. One is personal - our pack includes a dog. Another is personal - our pack includes children who eat food. A third is personal - our pack includes dogs and children who take medicines. A fourth is moral - even in the age of the GOP (the waning days we pray) we are still somewhat more protected than many others.

Now, in a Pulitzer Prize class story, Bogdanich and Hooker of the NYT have dropped the next bombshell. This is one of a series of related NYT exposes, including a 2/07 story on how Chinese counterfeit medications in Africa may have killed over a hundred thousand people.

This is not only a story of "foreign" suffering. Did you know that in 1995 50 tons of poisonous glycol was shipped to the US from China and was barely stopped from entering our medication supply? Another instance of how the stories not told are far more important than the average celebrity headline.

Any resemblance between this story and the recent pet poisoning story is, of course, fundamental. Emphases mine.

From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine - New York Times
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.

Many of them are children, poisoned at the hands of their unsuspecting parents.

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 [jf: they thought it was glycerin] mixed diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine — with devastating results. Families have reported 365 deaths from the poison...

Forty-six barrels of the toxic syrup arrived via a poison pipeline stretching halfway around the world. Through shipping records and interviews with government officials, The New York Times traced this pipeline from the Panamanian port of Colón, back through trading companies in Barcelona, Spain, and Beijing, to its beginning near the Yangtze Delta in a place local people call “chemical country.”

The counterfeit glycerin passed through three trading companies on three continents, yet not one of them tested the syrup to confirm what was on the label. Along the way, a certificate falsely attesting to the purity of the shipment was repeatedly altered, eliminating the name of the manufacturer and previous owner. As a result, traders bought the syrup without knowing where it came from, or who made it. With this information, the traders might have discovered — as The Times did — that the manufacturer was not certified to make pharmaceutical ingredients.

An examination of the two poisoning cases last year — in Panama and earlier in China — shows how China’s safety regulations have lagged behind its growing role as low-cost supplier to the world. It also demonstrates how a poorly policed chain of traders in country after country allows counterfeit medicine to contaminate the global market.

Last week, the United States Food and Drug Administration warned drug makers and suppliers in the United States “to be especially vigilant” in watching for diethylene glycol. The warning did not specifically mention China, and it said there was “no reason to believe” that glycerin in this country was tainted. Even so, the agency asked [jf: note "asked", not required] that all glycerin shipments be tested for diethylene glycol, and said it was “exploring how supplies of glycerin become contaminated.”...

... 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.

Seventy years ago, medicine laced with diethylene glycol killed more than 100 people in the United States, leading to the passage of the toughest drug regulations of that era and the creation of the modern Food and Drug Administration...

...When at least 88 children died in Haiti a decade ago, F.D.A. investigators traced the poison to the Manchurian city of Dalian, but their attempts to visit the suspected manufacturer were repeatedly blocked by Chinese officials, according to internal State Department records. Permission was granted more than a year later, but by then the plant had moved and its records had been destroyed.

“Chinese officials we contacted on this matter were all reluctant to become involved,” the American Embassy in Beijing wrote in a confidential cable. “We cannot be optimistic about our chances for success in tracking down the other possible glycerine shipments.”

In fact, The Times found records showing that the same Chinese company implicated in the Haiti poisoning also shipped about 50 tons of counterfeit glycerin to the United States in 1995. Some of it was later resold to another American customer, Avatar Corporation, before the deception was discovered. [jf: what the #$!#$@?]

“Thank God we caught it when we did,” said Phil Ternes, chief operating officer of Avatar, a Chicago-area supplier of bulk pharmaceuticals and nonmedicinal products. The F.D.A. said it was unaware of the shipment.

In China, the government is vowing to clean up its pharmaceutical industry, in part because of criticism over counterfeit drugs flooding the world markets. In December, two top drug regulators were arrested on charges of taking bribes to approve drugs. In addition, 440 counterfeiting operations were closed down last year, the World Health Organization said.

But when Chinese officials investigated the role of Chinese companies in the Panama deaths, they found that no laws had been broken, according to an official of the nation’s drug enforcement agency. China’s drug regulation is “a black hole,” said one trader who has done business through CNSC Fortune Way, the Beijing-based broker that investigators say was a crucial conduit for the Panama poison.

In this environment, Wang Guiping, a tailor with a ninth-grade education and access to a chemistry book, found it easy to enter the pharmaceutical supply business as a middleman. He quickly discovered what others had before him: that counterfeiting was a simple way to increase profits.

And then people in China began to die...

... Panamanians wanting to see where their toxic nightmare began could look up the Web site of the company in Hengxiang, China, that investigators in four countries have identified as having made the syrup — the Taixing Glycerine Factory...

... The Taixing Glycerine Factory bought its diethylene glycol from the same manufacturer as Mr. Wang, the former tailor, the government investigator said. From this spot in China’s chemical country, the 46 barrels of toxic syrup began their journey, passing from company to company, port to port and country to country, apparently without anyone testing their contents.

Traders should be thoroughly familiar with their suppliers, United States health officials say. “One simply does not assume that what is labeled is indeed what it is,” said Dr. Murray Lumpkin, deputy commissioner for international and special programs for the Food and Drug Administration.

In the Panama case, names of suppliers were removed from shipping documents as they passed from one entity to the next, according to records and investigators. That is a practice some traders use to prevent customers from bypassing them on future purchases, but it also hides the provenance of the product.

The first distributor was the Beijing trading company, CNSC Fortune Way, a unit of a state-owned business that began by supplying goods and services to Chinese personnel and business officials overseas.

As China’s market reach expanded, Fortune Way focused its business on pharmaceutical ingredients, and in 2003, it brokered the sale of the suspect syrup made by the Taixing Glycerine Factory. The manufacturer’s certificate of analysis showed the batch to be 99.5 percent pure.

Whether the Taixing Glycerine Factory actually performed the test has not been publicly disclosed.

Original certificates of analysis should be passed on to each new buyer, said Kevin J. McGlue, a board member of the International Pharmaceutical Excipients Council. In this case, that was not done.

Fortune Way translated the certificate into English, putting its name — not the Taixing Glycerine Factory’s — at the top of the document, before shipping the barrels to a second trading company, this one in Barcelona...

...Upon receiving the barrels in September 2003, the Spanish company, Rasfer International, did not test the contents, either. It copied the chemical analysis provided by Fortune Way, then put its logo on it. Ascensión Criado, Rasfer’s manager, said in an e-mail response to written questions that when Fortune Way shipped the syrup, it did not say who made it.

Several weeks later, Rasfer shipped the drums to a Panamanian broker, the Medicom Business Group. “Medicom never asked us for the name of the manufacturer,” Ms. Criado said...

...In Panama, the barrels sat unused for more than two years, and officials said Medicom improperly changed the expiration date on the syrup.

During that time, the company never tested the product. And the Panamanian government, which bought the 46 barrels and used them to make cold medicine, also failed to detect the poison, officials said...

... Last fall, at the request of the United States — Panama has no diplomatic relations with China — the State Food and Drug Administration of China investigated the Taixing Glycerine Factory and Fortune Way.

The agency tested one batch of glycerin from the factory, and found no glycerin, only diethylene glycol and two other substances, a drug official said.

Since then, the Chinese drug administration has concluded that it has no jurisdiction in the case because the factory is not certified to make medicine.

The agency reached a similar conclusion about Fortune Way, saying that as an exporter it was not engaged in the pharmaceutical business.

“We did not find any evidence that either of these companies had broken the law,” said Yan Jiangying, a spokeswoman for the drug administration. “So a criminal investigation was never opened.”

A drug official said the investigation was subsequently handed off to an agency that tests and certifies commercial products — the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

But the agency acted surprised to learn that it was now in charge. “What investigation?” asked Wang Jian, director of its Taixing branch. “I’m not aware of any investigation involving a glycerin factory.”

Besides, Huang Tong, an investigator in that office, said, “We rarely get involved in products that are sold for export.”...

This is not a system that's broken in a small way.

This is not a problem of "just" food or "just" medication or "just" lead poisoned tree ornaments or "just" fake fur that isn't or "just" contaminated herbal remedies. This is the return to our life of the conditions of 1930s America, an age before effective regulation and effective government. This is not a "China problem", though China because of its scale and power is at the center of it today.

We have a global trading system that's in crisis, colliding with a US government that's incompetent and paralyzed. Whoever takes over after Bush shuffles off will need to address this extremely aggressively.

Can we have a world trading system without the beginnings of a world legal and governmental system?