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Wider Sale Is Seen for Toothpaste
Tainted in China
By WALT BOGDANICH
Published: June 28, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/28/us/28tooth.html?_r=2&th&emc=th&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
After federal health officials discovered last month
that tainted Chinese toothpaste had entered the
United States, they warned that it would most likely
be found in discount stores.
In fact, the toothpaste has been distributed much
more widely. Roughly 900,000 tubes containing a
poison used in some antifreeze products have turned
up in hospitals for the mentally ill, prisons,
juvenile detention centers and even some hospitals
serving the general population.
The toothpaste was handed out in dozens of state
institutions, mostly in Georgia but also in North
Carolina, according to state officials. Hospitals in
South Carolina and Florida also reported receiving
Chinese-made toothpaste, and a major national
pharmaceutical distributor said it was recalling
tainted Chinese toothpaste.
The Food and Drug Administration has advised
consumers to discard all Chinese-made toothpaste,
regardless of the brand.
State officials in Georgia and North Carolina said
all the tainted tubes were being replaced with
brands made outside China. The officials said there
had been no reports of illnesses caused by the
toothpaste.
Officials of the Food and Drug Administration said
toothpaste with even small amounts of the bad
ingredient, diethylene glycol, a syrupy poison, had
a “low but meaningful risk of toxicity and injury”
for children and people with kidney or liver
disease.
“This stuff does not belong in toothpaste, period,”
a spokesman for the drug agency, Doug Arbesfeld,
said. “No Chinese toothpaste has come into the
country since the end of May.”
Since the Panamanian government found Chinese
toothpaste with diethylene glycol in May, countries
from Latin America to West Africa to Japan have
seized the toothpaste.
Panama last year inadvertently mixed the poison made
in China into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine,
killing at least 100 people, prosecutors there said.
Diethylene glycol is often used in Chinese
toothpaste in place of its more expensive chemical
cousin glycerin. Chinese regulators have said that
toothpaste with small amounts of diethylene glycol
is not harmful and that international concern is
unjustified.
After the drug agency expressed concern about
tainted toothpaste, the Georgia Department of
Administrative Services checked to see whether
Chinese toothpaste was being used by the state. The
department found it in 83 prisons, 4 mental health
centers and 4 juvenile detention centers, said Rick
Beal, contracts manager for the department.
Mr. Beal said officials confiscated 5,877 remaining
cases, each with 144 tubes, of the Springfresh
brand. Tests showed the toothpaste had a diethylene
glycol concentration of about 5 percent, he said.
The state bought the toothpaste for about 9 cents a
tube in 2002. Mr. Beal said he did not know how many
tubes had been used.
There are no reports of harm resulting from the
toothpaste, bought from a distributor, American
Amenities in Seattle.
“We do not know who their manufacturer from China
was,” Mr. Beal said.
A lawyer for American Amenities, Jesse Lyon, said it
had recalled all suspect shipments of the product
and had decided to stop importing Chinese
toothpaste. Mr. Lyon said he believed that American
Amenities had about 30 institutional customers, with
Georgia being the largest.
A spokesman for the North Carolina Department of
Corrections, George Dudley, said his agency
estimated that it bought 22,000 tubes of Pacific
brand Chinese toothpaste with a small amount of
diethylene glycol from Pacific Care Products in San
Francisco.
Pacific Care did not respond to a request for
comment, but an executive wrote to North Carolina
officials that the toothpaste came from Amercare
Products, also in Seattle. A spokeswoman for
Amercare declined to comment.
Chinese toothpaste containing “trace amounts” of
diethylene glycol has also been recalled from
healthcare institutions by McKesson, a major
pharmaceutical distributor and health services
company, said a spokesman, James Larkin.
Mr. Larkin said although this particular brand,
McKesson EverFRESH, was not on the drug agency’s
list of contaminated toothpaste, McKesson asked a
laboratory to test it. When small amounts of
diethylene glycol turned up, the company recalled
the product, he said.
“We went back through our records, and every
customer that ever bought the product was
contacted,” Mr. Larkin said.
He added that on short notice he could not determine
how many customers had bought the product.
One institution that did was Florida Hospital
Waterman, a 200-bed institution in Tavares, Fla.
“We pulled that product,” Bonnie Zimmerman of the
hospital said.
Ms. Zimmerman said that the toothpaste that replaced
it also came from China and it had “trace amounts”
of diethylene glycol. It, too, was removed, she
said.
In South Carolina, four hospitals in the Greenville
Hospital System also removed Chinese toothpaste,
even though its distributor said it did not have
diethylene glycol, said John Mateka, executive
director of materials management for the group. |
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