Word: diets
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...spate of recent diet-pill-related deaths in Japan touched off a round of criticism directed at the country's health officials, who drew fire for being slow to respond when people started getting sick. "Sometimes I wonder how many people had to die before anyone did anything," says Dr. Masayuki Adachi of Keio University Hospital in Tokyo. The 31-year-old doctor alerted the government in late April when two of his patients, both women, suffered liver failure after taking Chinese diet pills. "I couldn't prove a definitive connection," he says, "but I knew these drugs were very...
...deaths?as well as more than 600 illnesses linked in Japan to Chinese diet pills?have alerted health authorities to a hazard they have been almost powerless to stop. Similar drugs were implicated in deaths in China last year, with scores more falling ill in Korea and Hong Kong. Japan last month banned 24 types of Chinese diet drugs?many containing N-nitroso fenfluramine?and rushed through new laws placing the burden on importers to prove product safety or face a fine of up to $26,000. Just last week, health officials in China published a ban on 13 diet...
...regulatory palliatives are likely to be only temporary stopgaps. The region is awash in cheap diet aids manufactured in largely unregulated Chinese factories. Classified by many countries as "health food"?rather than as pharmaceutical products, which must pass rigorous safety tests before they can be marketed?the concoctions are readily imported and sold in Asian pharmacies and natural-medicine shops, even in beauty parlors and spas. Indeed, Asians tend to trust Chinese medicines as natural and safe dietary shortcuts based on 3,000 years of trial and error. Ancient Chinese apothecaries, however, never treated obesity. Lacking a time-tested herbal...
...Chen Guangyu, president of Changqingchun?a Huizhou-based company that makes Sennomoto-Kono, a diet drug linked to three recent deaths in Japan?has repeatedly insisted in the Japanese media that counterfeit drugs were actually the cause. "We have many copycats because we have such a good reputation," says the manager of the company's Beijing office, who identified herself only as Zhao. "We use only Chinese herbal medicines, not chemicals." Japan's Ministry of Health, however, found in recent tests that counterfeits of Sennomoto-kono contained no N-nitroso fenfluramine. Authentic Sennomoto-kono...
...year-old woman whose identity has not been released, died. That's when Adachi went to the press. In the resulting explosion of news coverage, he learned his cases weren't the first?three other Japanese deaths, all due to liver failure, had been linked to Chinese diet drugs since 2000. After the news broke, more than 600 other Japanese contacted the Health Ministry saying they had been sickened by the pills. Japan's government finally banned the drugs by name and enacted tighter controls in mid-July...