Close Your Eyes and Open Wide

If you think the FDA is not doing much of a job on inspecting prescription drug chemicals and imported food, according to articles in this weeks paper you are right. China, India, and Mexico are among companies that have had huge amounts of product returned and refused entry, in spite of admittedly weak and mostly an ineffective inspection program.

In Asia however, there have long been issues of lack of food safety. Corruption reached a sufficiently high level that in the face of potential boycotting or limitation of imports from China, the Chinese equivalent of director of the FDA was just put to death.

As Nguyen Van Ninh needles his chopsticks through a steaming bowl of Vietnam’s famous noodle soup, he knows it could be spiked with formaldehyde. But the thought of slurping up the same chemical used to preserve corpses isn’t enough to deter him.
“I think if we don’t see those chemicals being put in the food with our own eyes, then we can just smack our lips and pretend that there are no chemicals in the food,” he said, devouring a 30-cent bowl of “pho” on a busy Hanoi sidewalk. “Why worry about it?”

Here we are still worried about brushing our teeth and gargling with anti-freeze. And perhaps ranging further afield we aren’t sure about reports of spontaneous combustion and we have signs warning us not to talk on our cell phones while pumping gas. On the issues of drugs, it is estimated that 20 percent of generic drugs and up to 40 percent of the active ingredients of some medications come from India and China. It is predicted that within 15 years 80 percent of the key ingredients may come from those two countries. Soon we’ll just be making a lot of noise. But in the meantime, if it is to come in, more testing needs to be done. More testing also needs to be done on generic drugs for which there have been many cases of fraudulent testing performed over the past 20 years.

Online:

TDN

International Herald Tribune China Not Sole Source of Dubious Food