Investigators believe they have discovered what’s contaminating the blood-thinning medication heparin and are trying to determine whether it was put in the drug intentionally, the Food and Drug Administration announced today.
An altered version of a dietary supplement made from animal cartilage is now at the center of the worldwide drug safety investigation.
FDA officials said the man-made chemical compound known as over-sulfated chondroitin sulfate is cheap and abundant. It mimics heparin when tested, but is not naturally occurring and not something that would be part of the normal production chain for heparin.
Well if it isn’t shades of the pet food recall all over again, and, of course, China is involved.
Here’s the deal people: China doesn’t care. Sure, there might be some companies in China that care enough about product safety and actually making a product the way it is supposed to be made and not just making it look the way it’s supposed to, but how can you tell which is which? You can’t. So … stop buying stuff from China. That applies to both consumers and companies. Yes, it’s hard. Sometime you have to pay more, and sometimes you just have to do without, but some things are more important than having Mandarin oranges and cheap pet food and tube socks for a dollar a bag.
Like I said though, it’s really hard to tell. How do I know the supposedly healthy bread I bought at the store this week doesn’t have some ingredient from China that isn’t what it is supposed to be? I don’t. So there’s always a little worry that something is going to make us sick or worse. I hate feeling that paranoid about things, but that’s the world we live in. The best I can do is avoid the things obviously from China, only buy goods from companies I have vetted and trust, and doing without those things whose origins are uncertain.
The best bit of the above linked story though is this:
“Right now, people should not be alarmed,” Woodcock said. “We have not received any more reports of fatalities of this type since the recall on Feb. 28.”
Oh, well, nobody has died recently, so all’s well! :rolleyes:
A foreign producer can only offer goods for sale and any deal is contingent on the buyer’s acceptance.
China makes some top drawer product; however, our native capitalists concern themselves only with profit maximization, or ‘buy low, sell high.’
China has us addicted to their dope and there’s nothing we can do, nuclear arsenal notwithstanding.
Don’t think I don’t know the pet food companies over here were more concerned with “lookie, we found a super cheap source of wheat gluten” and not “is this stuff going to kill pets” … which is why I don’t buy any products at all from any of those companies anymore. All companies are more concerned with profit margins than anything else.
It’s almost impossible to not buy anything from China. I’ve tried. It’s just everywhere and in everything.
The problem is simple. People skilled enough to supervise making this kind of thing reliably are skilled enough to earn a hundred times as much in the west and they find ways to leave. I work with several such people myself. Some would never have discovered the wage discrepancy if western companies hadn’t tried to exploit it.