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...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 is called an active pharmaceutical ingredient, or API, for a drug called heparin, a blood thinner that is widely used by kidney-dialysis and postsurgical patients to prevent blood clots. The team found little unusual and gave the facility a clean bill of health...
...milk scandal is simply the latest and not by any means the most lethal example of the dark side of Chinese capitalism. The heparin case, in fact, has been far deadlier. Last summer the Food and Drug Administration updated the estimated death toll worldwide associated with tainted heparin to 149. As more and more pharmaceuticals are sourced in developing countries--an estimated $1.5 billion from China and India alone in 2007, according to a study by Credit Suisse--the heparin case has raised a fundamental question in the U.S. and the rest of the developed world: How safe...
...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...
...jarring to see where a drug like heparin begins. Liu Jing, a cheerful 36-year-old, is stomping around in pig poop and mud in knee-high boots. He is a farmer in Jiangsu province, north of Shanghai, where providing the raw ingredients for heparin is a big business. Liu's farm produces a key source of heparin: pig intestines. (Heparin is derived from the 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...
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...