The article, The Everyman Who Exposed Tainted Toothpaste written by Walt Bogdanich (New York Times, October 1, 2007), describes an interesting situation in which 51-year-old Eduardo Arias of Panama discovered a poisonous ingredient in his toothpaste. The toothpaste contained diethylene glycol, an ingredient that had been responsible for over 100 deaths in Panama last year in a similar incident involving cough syrup. Health alerts have been reported in 34 countries and Japan discovered 20 million tubes containing diethylene glycol. The toothpaste had been imported from China.
I cannot believe the fatal levels of the ingredient in this product went unnoticed and was sold on the open market. This is poor on China’s part, as there was clearly no regulation from any national administration. This is scary as we import so many items from China, and simple things such as toothpaste can pose a severe health hazard. China has ordered the manufactures to stop including the diethylene glycol. Nonetheless, serious oversights were made on China’s part. A country with exporting on such a massive scale should have harsher regulations on what they can ship all over the world. Mistakes such as this cannot be made.
2 comments:
I think this article shows that products being shipped into countrie are not as carefully inspected as they should be. It also shows that Chinese products live up to the reputation of not being as good as they could be. Putting something so deadly into toothpaste is scary because it is a common product and you wouldn't expect it to have something like that in there. I think it's really lucky that this guy noticed those words on the toothpaste otherwise there would be a lot more deaths from the same deadly ingredient that was in the cough syrup that killed so many people.
This is a pretty sad mistake. It's terrible that so many people had to die because of a company trying to cut costs. This isn't the main problem of this article though.
Although it was the manufacture's fault, the poison should have been caught way before it ever it the market place. Officials from all of these countries should have inspected the labels before releasing it to the public. People either need to be hired for fired for this mishap.
The other disturbing part of this situation is China's actions. How can we trust a trade partner if they are releasing poisons into the global market? It is also pretty pathetic that they will not take responsibility for their actions. America needs to be very careful in the future when trading with China
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