Word: heparin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Three weeks later, his 47-year-old son Randy, also a dialysis patient and a heparin user, suddenly had symptoms similar to those that had killed his mother. Shockingly, he died on Jan. 15, as his wife Colleen, a dialysis nurse (they had met at the clinic years earlier), frantically and futilely tried to revive him. An uncomprehending family buried Randy Hubley next to his mother in Toledo...
...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...
...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...
...Changzhou says it relies on two companies--its joint-venture partner, Changzhou Techpool, as well as a Hangzhou-based firm, Ruihua Biomedical Products Co.--to buy its crude heparin. Strunce has described them as meticulous in ensuring the quality of the crude heparin they buy for SPL. But several small suppliers told TIME they have sold directly to SPL or have been approached by the company, looking for product. And when FDA inspectors showed up in Hangzhou this year, after reports of a spike in deaths and illness, Ruihua Biomedical stiff-armed the investigators. It refused to let them inspect...