Contaminated Heparin Just the Tip Of The Poisoned Chinese Iceberg

Next time you hear a politician give you the runaround on why American drugs are safer than those made in Canada, consider this. Heparin, that blood thinner that is used in hospitals all the time, is being recalled. At least a big portion of it provided by Baxter (an American company) may contain contaminated ingredients from China. Say what?

Yup, good old SAFE American drugs are made from cheap Chinese ingredients. Now just where does that make our pharmaceuticals better than say…Canada? The truth is we use the cheapest ingredients like everyone else and since the FDA has been systematically gutted by the Bush administration our prescriptions are no safer than anyone else’s.

In China, though there are lots of regulations about quality they are not enforced, leading to slip shod manufacturing processes and contaminated ingredients. Remember the dog food, or Barbie dolls, or any of hundreds of safety problems with everything from lead paint to outsight poison in goods from China.

The latest example, the contaminated Heparin is just the tip of the Chinese iceberg and unless we do something to stop this flood of tainted goods, we will all end up in trouble. How can we stop it? Well for a start we can vote the current administration out of office. Impeachment isn’t going to happen, so we have to assure that the Bush administration cannot continue in the form of John McCain.

It’s time we put a halt to the import of defective and dangerous products from China and anywhere else. Once upon a time, we had a very good system of inspection and regulation that made our country safe from defective products, but that was a long time ago, before the corporations that sell these poisoned goods took over our government. It’s time we took that government back.