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Kongfuzi, better known on this side of the Prime Meridian as Confucius, outlined one of the world’s clearest and most durable ethical systems. Thousands of years after writing his Analects, he’s still got admirers among scholars (and bloggers!) around the world. And although viewed as a dangerously counter-revolutionary imperial influence during the years of the Cultural Revolution, he’s becoming popular once again in the Chinese mainland.
It’s hard to escape the feeling that were Kongfuzi to return to China today and take a look around, he’d fail to be impressed by quite a few things. Some things would be influences from overseas (the nation being an embodiment of moral virtue — or moral shortcomings). But a few less-than-impressive things would be bubbling up from China’s own bubbling wells of beautiful waters. Well, colorful waters, anyway. Yes, those all come from a rainbow of lakes and rivers in China – a veritable flood of accidental poisons.
And recently, some poisonings have been less accidental, according to the New York Times.
That’s a story on antifreeze being sold as cough medicine. (Yes, something a bit worse than that squicksome hair soy sauce scam.)
To be more precise, the story is about counterfeiters using diethylene glycol instead of glycerin as the “syrup” part of cough syrup — and a bunch of other things that glycerin is used in, like toothpaste, cosmetics and various foodstuffs. Like glycerin, it’s a sweet, viscous liquid. Unlike glycerin, it’s pretty darn cheap to make, and it causes kidney failure, nervous system damage, paralysis and eventually death.
There’ve been eight big mass poisoning incidents involving diethylene glycol in the past 20 years. Most of the time, investigators haven’t been able to track where the stuff came from. But in three of the last four incidents, it’s come from factories in Taixing, China, a place not far from Shanghai and part of China’s “chemical country.”
In Panama, 365 children are reported to have died after their parents gave them cough syrup made with diethylene glycol. They had no way of knowing. The company who they bought the stuff from had no way of knowing. And even the company THAT company bought the stuff from… they all thought it was glycerin.
From the NY Times:
The counterfeit glycerin passed through three trading companies on three continents, yet not one of them tested the syrup to confirm what was on the label. Along the way, a certificate falsely attesting to the purity of the shipment was repeatedly altered, eliminating the name of the manufacturer and previous owner.
This comes on the heel of that tainted pet food story… the poisoned pet food being tainted with melamine labeled as wheat gluten… from a factory in Xuzhou, China. That sensational outbreak (which, of course, got a lot more column-inches than dead kids in Panama) has led to international repercussions, with Chinese gluten distributors ambassadors being escorted through the halls of power by bigwigs from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and U.S. senators promising to write letters.
Of course, this public panic extends to kids (and pets) in places other than China. But one has to wonder what’s going on with this stuff in China’s lowest social echelon – the kids inside the Social Welfare Institutions. And you thought lead levels from paint (or more likely leaded gasoline) were enough to worry about….
