China is the world's leading supplier of heparin, a blood thinner often made from a substance in the intestines of pigs. It is commonly given to prevent blood clots in heart surgery and dialysis patients.
Baxter's heparin was contaminated with a look-alike ingredient that mimicked heparin in standard tests of drug potency and purity.
The FDA announced last month that it had identified the contaminant as a modified form of a common nutritional supplement. That substance is cheaper to produce than heparin, leading to suspicions that it may have been intentionally added somewhere along a complex and lightly regulated supply chain in China.
Rico says the Chinese aren't evil, just cheap... (But the old Communist solution-- put a handful of the guilty up against the wall and shoot them-- would go a long way toward cutting this crap out.)
09 April 2008
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