Chinese Fake Glycerine
The NYT
had a long story on the Chinese cough syrup poisoning. Antifreeze was labelled as glycerine in China and used in cough medicine in Panama. This is a great example for my article on trust and trade with the Third World. It’s also a good warning. I think I’ll stop eating canned food from China.
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. There, under the words “About Us,” they would see a picture of a modern white building nearly a dozen stories tall, adorned by three arches at the entrance. The factory, the Web site boasts, “can strictly obey the contract and keep its word.”
But like the factory’s syrup, all is not as it seems.
There are no tall buildings in Hengxiang, a country town with one main road. The factory is not certified to sell any medical ingredients, Chinese officials say. And it looks nothing like the picture on the Internet. In reality, its chemicals are mixed in a plain, one-story brick building….
The Taixing Glycerine Factory bought its diethylene glycol from the same manufacturer as Mr. Wang, the former tailor, the government investigator said. …
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. …
In Panama, the barrels sat unused for more than two years, and officials said Medicom improperly changed the expiration date on the syrup….
While the suffering in Panama was great, the potential profit — at least for the Spanish trading company, Rasfer — was surprisingly small. For the 46 barrels of glycerin, Rasfer paid Fortune Way $9,900, then sold them to Medicom for $11,322, according to records….
One lingering mystery involves the name of the product made by the Taixing Glycerine Factory. The factory had called its syrup “TD” glycerin. The letters TD were in virtually all the shipping documents. What did TD mean?
Spanish medical authorities concluded that it stood for a manufacturing process. Chinese inspectors thought it was the manufacturer’s secret formula.
But Yuan Kailin, a former salesman for the factory , said he knew what the TD meant because a friend and former manager of the factory, Ding Yuming, had once told him. TD stood for the Chinese word “tidai” (pronounced tee-die), said Mr. Yuan, who left his job in 1998 and still lives about a mile from the factory.
In Chinese, tidai means substitute. A clue that might have revealed the poison, the counterfeit product, was hiding in plain sight.
It was in the product name.