Unregulated Chinese Chemicals Flow Into World Drug Market

CBS Online
The Skinny is Keach Hagey's take on the top news of the day and the best of the Internet.
NEW YORK, Oct. 31, 2007

Here's another scary story to start your Halloween off right.

An investigative report by the New York Times found that scores of Chinese chemical companies who are totally unregulated by the Chinese government are able to get their drug ingredients onto the international market - and thereby, into Americans' bodies - by selling them at trade shows and on the Internet.

Mad (and, occasionally, criminally charged) scientists were doing the Monster Mash this month at the world's biggest pharmaceutical ingredients trade show in Milan.

In one corner, there was Honor International Pharmtech, accused of shipping counterfeit drugs into the U.S. in January. In another was the booth reserved by Orient Pacific International, a chemical company whose owner was unable to attend the festivities because he was in a Houston jail on charges of selling counterfeit medicine for schizophrenia, prostate cancer, blood clots and Alzheimer's disease. Also attending were two exporters owned by China's government that had sold poison mislabeled as a drug ingredient, which killed nearly 200 people and injured countless others in Haiti and Panama.

Trick or treat, indeed.

This motley crew points to a deeper problem, according to the Times: Pharmaceutical ingredients exported from China are often made by chemical companies that are neither certified nor inspected by the Chinese drug regulators.

That's because in China, chemical manufacturers that sell drug ingredients fall into a regulatory hole. Pharmaceutical companies are regulated by the food and drug agencies. But chemical companies that make products as varied as fertilizer and chemical solvents are regulated by other agencies. Chinese officials have known about the regulatory gap since the mid-1990s, when the deaths in Haiti happened. But so far the Times says they've "failed to co-operate to stop chemical companies from exporting drug products."

The substandard drugs made from these ingredients often end up in pharmacies in developing countries and for sale on the Internet, the paper reports, where Americans are turning for cheap drugs.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/31/the_skinny/main3435123.shtml