looks like all is going well over there.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080227/ap_ ... uted_river

Pollution turns Chinese river system red

Pollution has turned part of a major river system in central China red and bubbly, forcing authorities to cut water supplies to 200,000 people and close schools, a government news agency reported Wednesday.

Some communities along tributaries of the Hanjiang River — a branch of the Yangtze — in Hubei province were using emergency water sources, while at least 60,000 people were relying on bottled water and limited underground sources, Xinhua News Agency said.

Five schools were closed in Xingou township, while others could not provide food to students, the report said without elaborating.

Gao Qijin, head of the water company in Xingou township, said officials discovered the Dongjing River — one of the tributaries — was red and bubbly Sunday. The company immediately stopped drawing water from the river, Xinhua cited Gao as saying.

Tests showed the polluted waters contained elevated levels of ammonia, nitrogen, and permanganate, a chemical used in metal cleaning, tanning and bleaching, Xinhua said. The source of the pollution had not been determined, and an investigation was ongoing.

Local officials closed a gate linking the Hanjiang River to the tributaries, and were using water from the nearby Changhu Lake to flush out the pollutants, the report said.

A paper mill dumped waste water directly into the Hanjiang last September, forcing authorities to cut water supplies for a week in some areas, Xinhua said. It did not say how many people were affected.

wikipedia actually has a good entry on their environment. there's been a nice movement to improve policies there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environment_of_China

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/healt ... ref=health

Drug Tied to China Had Contaminant, F.D.A. Says

Federal drug regulators said Wednesday that a critical blood thinner that had been linked to at least 19 deaths and whose raw components were produced in China contained a possibly counterfeit ingredient that mimicked the real drug.

Routine tests failed to distinguish the contaminant from the drug, heparin. Only sophisticated magnetic resonance imaging tests uncovered that as much as 20 percent of the product’s active ingredient was a heparin mimic blended in with the real thing. Federal officials said they did not know what the contaminant was.

“At this point, we do not know whether the introduction was accidental or whether it was deliberate,” said the Food and Drug Administration’s deputy commissioner, Dr. Janet Woodcock.

Heparin is made from pig intestines. Scientific Protein Laboratories, based in Waunakee, Wis., bought raw heparin produced in some cases in small, unregulated family workshops in China and processed it in plants in Wisconsin and China, according to heparin traders and producers in China. Baxter International purchased the active ingredient from Scientific Protein and sold the finished drug.

Wayne Pines, a spokesman for Scientific Protein Laboratories, said that nothing sinister about the contamination had been proved. “There is no evidence of counterfeiting or tampering or anything of that nature,” Mr. Pines said. “No one really knows what happened here.”

Beginning in November, public health officials received reports of patients experiencing severe allergic reactions after being given Baxter’s product. Baxter initiated a series of recalls that culminated last week in a withdrawal of nearly all of Baxter’s heparin production.

The F.D.A. has now received 785 reports of serious injuries associated with the drug’s use. Forty-six deaths have also been reported to the agency, but Dr. Woodcock said that just 19 of these appeared related to the suspect heparin. Baxter executives said that the total death toll was actually four.

APP Pharmaceuticals, which previously split the heparin market with Baxter, has been ramping up production to meet demand. So far, APP’s products show no signs of similar contamination, Dr. Woodcock said, although some of APP’s production is also based in China.

Most of the world’s heparin supply originates in China, according to Baxter. The F.D.A. will soon make public the test used to distinguish between real heparin and its mimic in hopes that regulatory bodies around the world will adopt the test. “We don’t know if any of the heparin products worldwide might contain this contaminant, and that is something we are going to be looking into,” Dr. Woodcock said.

The F.D.A. has yet to prove that the heparin contaminant is the cause of the deaths and illnesses now associated with the use of Baxter’s product. But heparin batches associated with illnesses, all of which were produced with ingredients made in China, were found to contain the contaminant while batches not linked to illnesses proved to be untainted. In a written statement, Scientific Protein said that “it is premature to conclude that the heparin active pharmaceutical ingredient sourced from China and provided by S.P.L. to Baxter is responsible for these adverse events.”

Since tainted batches were produced by Scientific Protein’s plants in both Wisconsin and China, “either both plants have problems with processing or there’s something wrong further up the stream,” said Peter Arduini, president of Baxter’s medication delivery business.

The F.D.A. admitted last month that it had violated its own policies by failing to inspect Scientific Protein’s China plant before approving the drug for sale. The agency sent inspectors to the plant last month who found that at least some heparin was made from “material from an unacceptable workshop vendor.”

Baxter undertook its own inspection of the China plant last fall. “A few of our observations touched on the same areas as F.D.A.’s inspectional findings,” said Ray Godlewski, vice president for quality at Baxter’s medication delivery business. Mr. Godlewski refused to be more specific because, he said, of a confidentiality agreement with Scientific Protein.

Mr. Pines of Scientific Protein said he did not know what problems Baxter uncovered last fall or why those problems were not corrected by the time federal inspectors arrived last month.

China has become by far the largest supplier of pharmaceutical ingredients in the world, but there is growing concern about the quality of the products made there. Last year, the F.D.A. discovered that a pet food ingredient shipped from China contained toxic levels of melamine, which was added to make it appear higher in protein. Many pets became ill, and some died.

In addition, Panamanian investigators have concluded that at least 174 people were poisoned, 115 of them fatally, by counterfeit cold medicine linked to an unlicensed Chinese chemical plant.

A series of independent assessments, including one by the agency’s own Science Board, have found that the F.D.A. is increasingly overwhelmed by its many responsibilities and is incapable of protecting the public from unsafe drugs, medical devices and food — particularly from China.

The Government Accountability Office recently discovered, for example, that over a six-year period, the F.D.A. inspected just 64 of the nearly 700 medical device plants registered in China. Medical devices can include items like stents and spinal screws.

There is a growing bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill that the agency needs a rapid infusion of money. The Bush administration has proposed an increase in the agency’s budget next year of just 3 percent — not enough to keep up with increased expenses. But the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach, said in a recent interview that the agency needed more money.

Dr. von Eschenbach said Wednesday that, even if the agency had adequately inspected the China plant, it might not have caught a problem resulting when “someone either intentionally or unintentionally manipulates a product.” He said that the agency needed to approach its inspections program “in a more strategic way” and that it needed “good surveillance” of adverse events associated with unsafe drugs “so that we can respond and mitigate that outcome.”

But the F.D.A. has for years had a drug safety surveillance system that relies on voluntary reports by patients and doctors to report problems. The agency itself estimates that these reports represent as little as 1 percent of the actual number of drug problems.

Problems with heparin reported to the agency include difficulty breathing, nausea, vomiting, excessive sweating and rapidly falling blood pressure that in some cases led to life-threatening shock.

The Chinese heparin market has been in turmoil over the past year as pig disease swept through the country, leading some farmers to sell sick pigs into the market and forcing heparin producers to scramble for new sources of raw material.

The worst thing about Chinese pills is that you're sick again thirty minutes after you take them.

Sweet, sweet fake Chinese pharmaceuticals. The sad thing is the Chinese government would only act significantly on this if it was Chinese patients getting sick and dying from it.

*chuckles*

Sounds like most countries.

the question before the tribunal: will China fuck itself over so completely as to render its own land a virtual wasteland in the process of attempting to become the premier world power? Or will they just make it really gross?

I can't find the more recent recall threads. =(

There have been recent reports of many children in china being sickened by milk products laced with melamine. I don't remember this being reported in previous news reports, but it is speculated that the melamine was intentionally added in order for the tests for protein content to read normal levels. The milk was watered down, and then the melamine was added. How did they think they could get away with it?

well, for most of the people it's still a third world country
so it's not so hard to take advantage of people who don't really have a choice in the matter, especially when regulations are inefficient and there isn't an investigative news media.

also, a pretty fucked up story here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/world/asia/29kashgar.html?ref=world
about machete murders in china right around the time of the olympics

fuck china. we got fucking problems here.

What about all of us non-Americans? Can we keep talking about China?

Canucks might as well be Americans.

no. worry about your own damn country.

Actually, I think that the melamine issue requires more serious thought than a lot of Americans are giving it. Why was melamine, specifically, added to the milk? Because it is a known and at one time widely utilized feed additive for cattle. Since WWII, we have been searching for ways to increase the level of accessible nitrogen in cattle feed in order to boost muscle growth without actually having to feed the cattle nutritious food. Melamine itself is not particularly toxic until combined with yet another non-protein feed additive, cyanuric acid. The combination of the two results in an insoluble complex that can result in fatal kidney stones. Melamine was rejected as an additive to cattle feed thirty years ago because the slow rate of hydrolysis in order to free the nitrogen for metabolism was deemed too slow, but cyanuric acid remains a component of cattle feed. In fact Archer-Daniels-Midland remains one of the largest dealers of cyanuric acid as a component of cattle feed.

And we've had our own contaminated milk scandals in the US:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/30/opini ... ?th&emc=th

dammit, you're right. Time to bump the Canadian election thread!

As far as elements go, Nitrogen is a real tease. Being plentiful in forms that are difficult to utilize and all. One of my colleagues was working on a program to genetically modify fowl to increase the efficiency of phosphate absorption, as unholy amounts are added to their feed, which then ends up in the water supply.

Yah.

You certainly know how to cut to the core of me Lysander.

Good stuff!

You may be my new favorite person here.

and you may have the thickest, most luxurious beard of any poster here. (I'm assuming that's you in your avatar)