China Implicated In Mass Deaths

While we've been reading about the dog food, it seems there's been something far more nefarious going on with counterfeit drugs linked to China now killing people around the world. Diethylene glycol is a primary ingredient in anti-freeze, sweet tasting and much less expensive than the syrup it was intentionally used to replace.

Panama is the most recent victim. Last year, government officials there unwittingly mixed diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine — with devastating results. Families have reported 365 deaths from the poison, 100 of which have been confirmed so far. With the onset of the rainy season, investigators are racing to exhume as many potential victims as possible before bodies decompose even more.

Panama’s death toll leads directly to Chinese companies that made and exported the poison as 99.5 percent pure glycerin.

Not a good way to go - see Pundita for more

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.

Chemical country The Taixing countryside in eastern China, near the Yangtze Delta. Forty-six barrels of toxic syrup followed a path from a factory in the nearby small town of Hengxiang to Panama.
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.

Comments

[bloodrage bob]

so let's recap. the chinese are already notorious for being pretty much the sorriest people on earth outside of africa and north korea: they have no problem at all stealing other people's ideas and work - see rampant copyright violations; cd's; dvd's; industrial sabotage, etc etc - they're going to attack taiwan soon after the '08 olympics - they make no bones about this - they're easily the biggest polluters on the planet; they're raping africa and the africans on a *massive* basis; they're already engaged in massive computer fraud/sabotage against the US; they lock up and kill their own citizens and others;

aaaaaaaaaand - for all you liberals out there gearing up to reflexively defend them in your moronic kneejerk fashion.....

no one on the planet is crueller to animals than the chinese. routinely. habitually. as an integral part of their tawdry little *culture*. and now, of course, it turns out they're poisoning people and pets - JUST LIKE THEY KNEW WOULD HAPPEN- to make a lousy buck.

why again are we doing business with these assholes? why again do the leftist twits defend them?

[Hard Right]

The Chinese govt has it's hands in just about every part of Chinese society-legal and illegal. So when some company uses something lethal to pump up it's profits by fooling protein ratings, you can bet the Chinese govt has a chunk of the profits.