Chinese Company Linked to Deaths Wasn’t Licensed

By Jake Hooker | The New YHork Times
May 09, 2007

BEIJING, May 8 — China’s drug regulation agency has confirmed that the company linked to counterfeit medicine that caused at least 100 deaths in Panama was not licensed to be engaged in the pharmaceutical business, the Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.

Jiang Yu, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said the agency, the State Food and Drug Administration, conducted an investigation last year in response to a request by officials at the United States Food and Drug Administration.

Ms. Jiang’s comments, made in a regular Tuesday briefing, were prompted by an article on Sunday in The New York Times that described how cough medicine in Panama was tainted with a poisonous industrial solvent, diethylene glycol, that was traced to a factory in eastern China.

The article reported that the solvent — which passed through brokers in China, Spain and Panama — was falsely identified as glycerin, a sweet-tasting syrup that is a common ingredient in medicine.

The Foreign Ministry said neither the chemical company that made the toxic syrup, the Taixing Glycerine Factory, nor the Chinese state-owned trading firm that exported it, CNSC Fortune Way, fell under the regulatory supervision of China’s drug administration.

Ms. Jiang emphasized that Chinese drug manufacturers must follow strict rules in the purchase of raw pharmaceutical ingredients and solvents in medicine. But her comments stopped short of fully addressing the role played by the chemical factory in the deaths in Panama.