Word: baxter
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...month earlier and half a world away, a team of quality-control specialists from Baxter International, the big multinational health-care company (2007 sales: $11.26 billion) based in Deerfield, Ill., arrived in Zhejiang province, China, about two hours by car from Shanghai, to inspect a facility owned by one of its key suppliers. CZ-SPL is a joint venture controlled by Scientific Protein Laboratories LLC (SPL), a Waunakee, Wis., company started in 1976 by Oscar Meyer, of hot-dog fame. (The connection: pigs naturally produce proteins used in pharmaceuticals.) CZ-SPL makes a key ingredient, what in the pharmaceutical business...
...after two months of dialysis using heparin produced by Baxter, Bonnie Hubley was rushed into intensive care. She had developed diarrhea, vomiting and eventually severe pain in her chest and abdomen. She deteriorated rapidly and by Dec. 19 was unconscious and on a breathing tube. Stunned doctors at the Toledo, Ohio, hospital told Leroy there was no hope. "She was gone," he says. So with "Christmas carols playing in the background," he says, "we said our goodbyes, and my wife of 48 years drifted away...
...answer is, Not nearly safe enough. What happened from September 2007, when the Baxter safety inspectors arrived and left, to the end of the year, when deaths and illnesses apparently related to use of the drug began to occur, is a tale of the risks global companies take in engaging the cutthroat ethos that is the underside of China's economy...
...mucous membranes in the intestines.) Nearly half the world's pigs are in China, so companies like SPL have set up shop. In SPL's case, it first began buying raw heparin in 1996, established its own production facility to make the API in 2000 and began selling to Baxter, among others, in 2004. More than half the heparin sold--for Baxter alone it was a $30 million business last year--is made from pig guts bought in China...
Farmers like Liu sell to small-scale companies--often family-run businesses--that process the intestines into crude heparin, which in turn becomes the key ingredient for the heparin that Baxter and other major drug firms sell worldwide. SPL's CEO, David Strunce, told Congress last spring that the raw material comes from "government-regulated slaughterhouses." But that regulation, farmers in Jiangsu told TIME, is haphazard at best. And if the slaughterhouses are haphazardly regulated, the small heparin-processing businesses--hundreds of them across the country--are virtually unregulated. "We haven't ever had the government come and inspect...