Saturday, February 16, 2008

U.S. Drugs Coming From China

The blood thinner drug Heparin is being made from chemicals imported from China. The FDA tells Americans they can't buy drugs from Canada because they're "unsafe" and yet drug companies buy contaminated chemical ingredients from a country that has been too often in the news as "unsafe."

If you think these Chinese chemical companies are being inspected, the facts show that 93% of the factories have not been inspected, so they have no idea about quality control being used (if any is being used).

The news article reads:

A Chinese facility that hasn't been inspected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration made the active ingredient in much of the widely used Baxter International Inc. blood-thinner that is under investigation. Baxter announced that it had temporarily halted production of its version of the generic anticlotting drug heparin because of about 350 bad reactions potentially tied to the drug, including four fatalities after reports of hundreds of allergic reactions and four deaths among the drug's users, the agency said yesterday.

China is now the world's largest producer of active pharmaceutical ingredients -- the chemical compounds needed to make finished pills and other drugs.

Recent testimony from the Government Accountability Office said that the FDA may only inspect around 7% of foreign drug-making facilities in a given year, and it would take the agency more than 13 years at that rate to inspect all the plants. The testimony also said the FDA "cannot provide the exact number of foreign establishments that have never been inspected."

Read the entire article.

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