Poison for sale ...

Pet poisonings sounded a wake-up call for inspections of Chinese food imports. A lethal chemical in medicines amplifies the need

China, low-cost supplier to the world, exports everything from ... well, just about everything. Including death?

It looks that way. Earlier this year dozens of brands of pet food were recalled due to contamination with an industrial product, melamine, that apparently killed dogs and cats. The melamine was mixed into wheat gluten and rice protein sold by two Chinese companies to pet food suppliers here and in Canada.

And poisonous chemicals from China have found their way -- not for the first time -- into over-the-counter medicines in this hemisphere, with deadly results.

A chilling New York Times report, published Sunday in The N&O, traced to China a poison that killed at least 100 people last year in Panama. The substance, diethylene glycol, is an industrial solvent and ingredient in antifreeze. But the sweet-tasting solvent can be substituted, disastrously, for a more expensive syrup, glycerin, in medicines.

Panamanian officials mixed -- unwittingly, it seems -- diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine. Traced back, the shipping trail led to Chinese companies that made and exported the poison as 99.5 percent pure glycerin.

The circumstances may be eerily familiar to readers of the page opposite. Ten years ago David R. Work, then executive director of the N.C. Board of Pharmacy, detailed in a Point of View article an incident involving diethylene glycol from China and the deaths of at least 89 children in Haiti.

In that case, a shipment left China labeled as 98.36 percent glycerin. It was bought by a Haitian pharmaceutical firm and made into an acetaminophen product. After the children's deaths, a batch from the same shipment was analyzed, in part, at 55 percent glycerin and 22 percent diethylene glycol.

According to the Times report, at least three of the last four episodes of diethylene glycol poisoning around the world originated in China. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently warned drug makers and suppliers here "to be especially vigilant" for diethylene glycol.

As both David Work and the Times noted, the chemical is well known in the pharmaceutical trade. It caused hundreds of deaths in the United States in 1937, when substandard glycerin was used to make a drug product. "The public uproar over that tragedy," Work wrote, "produced the U.S. Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938," the foundation for today's FDA.

Now, more than ever, that agency needs to ramp up efforts to protect the public. As the pet food scare showed, China is increasingly the source of ingredients incorporated into food products here, and the Chinese inspection system is lax or nonexistent. Appropriately, the FDA has banned imports of Chinese-made wheat gluten and has named an assistant commissioner for food protection. It needs additional authority, money and inspectors to check imported foods.

And, as the tragic poisonings in Panama and Haiti show, it needs more resources and commitment to track down China's careless, deadly exports of diethylene glycol and shut them out of the medicine cabinet.