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from China
May 25, 2007 · Toothpaste from China is the latest
official worry. This week, the Food and Drug Administration began
testing it at U.S. ports of entry after contaminated Chinese toothpaste
began showing up in other countries. It contained a chemical used in
antifreeze — the same chemical that killed people in Panama last year
when it turned up in cough syrup, mislabeled by Chinese manufacturers as
a harmless sweetener. An FDA spokesman says no test results are
available yet on the toothpaste at U.S. ports.
The FDA is still watching vegetable proteins from China for signs of
melamine contamination, a chemical that turned up in pet food and animal
feed earlier this spring.
U.S. officials are asking the Chinese to do more to safeguard the food
and drugs they export to America. And Thursday, Secretary of Health and
Human Services Mike Leavitt warned that any nation that loses U.S. trust
in its exports will suffer economically.
"Assuring the safety of food in large nations is a demanding
proposition, whether it's China or the United States," Leavitt said.
"And neither of our countries has perfected this process."
Many experts say the problems are a consequence of globalization, and
especially of America's growing dependence on China for food
ingredients.
The FDA lists on its Web site food imports its inspectors have refused
at U.S. ports. Last month, FDA inspectors blocked 257 food shipments
from China, according to the list.
"That's by far the most of all the countries of the world," says William
Hubbard.
He knows the FDA inside out; Hubbard used to be its deputy commissioner
and now works with the Coalition for a Stronger FDA.
Even when the volume of Chinese imports is taken into account, that's a
far higher reject rate than other trading partners.
In the past year, the FDA rejected more than twice as many food
shipments from China as from all other countries combined.
The rejected shipments make an unappetizing list. Inspectors commonly
block Chinese food imports because they're "filthy." That's the official
term.
"They might smell decomposition. They might see gross contamination of
the food. 'Filthy' is a broad term for a product that is not fit for
human consumption," Hubbard says.
Another rejection code is "vet-drug-res." That means the food product,
usually things like fish, seafood and eels, contains residues of
veterinary drugs, such as antibiotics and antifungals.
"These fish are often raised in polluted water, unfortunately. So
they're given these drugs to treat them," Hubbard says.
Drug residues in food are illegal. They promote antibiotic resistance,
which makes drugs useless when they're needed. One drug that routinely
shows up in Chinese food imports is dangerous. It's a veterinary
antibiotic that causes cancer in animals.
When Hubbard was at the FDA, he heard all kinds of stories about foreign
food processors, like the one a staffer told him after visiting a
Chinese factory that makes herbal tea.
"To speed up the drying process, they would lay the tea leaves out on a
huge warehouse floor and drive trucks over them so that the exhaust
would more rapidly dry the leaves out," Hubbard says. "And the problem
there is that the Chinese use leaded gasoline, so they were essentially
spewing the lead over all these leaves."
That lead-contaminated herbal tea would only be caught by FDA inspectors
at the border if they knew to look for it, Hubbard says.
"The system is so understaffed now that what is being caught and stopped
is only a fraction of the food that's actually slipping through the
net," he says.
The FDA normally inspects about 1 percent of all food and food
ingredients at U.S. borders. It does tests on about half of 1 percent.
And official vigilance has been going down — for two reasons.
First, food imports have increased dramatically, from $45 billion in
2003 to $64 billion three years later.
Second, the "food" part of the FDA has been getting smaller.
Shaun Kennedy of the National Center for Food Protection and Defense
says no country is increasing its food exports faster than China.
"China has increased overall its food imports to the United States by
over 20 percent in the last year alone," Kennedy says. "Going back three
years, we have doubled our agricultural inputs from China."
China has become the leading supplier of many food ingredients, such as
apple juice, a primary sweetener in many foods; garlic and garlic
powder, a major flavor agent; sausage casings and cocoa butter.
China now supplies 80 percent of the world's ascorbic acid — vitamin C.
It's used as a preservative and nutritional enriching agent in thousands
of foods. One-third of the world's vitamin A now comes from China, along
with much of the supply of vitamin B-12 and many health-food
supplements, such as the amino acid lysine.
That is no accident. Chinese manufacturers have tried to corner the
market in many food ingredients by under-pricing other suppliers.
Leo Hepner, a food-ingredient consultant based in London, says vitamin C
is a good example.
"The price in 1995 was $15 per kilogram," Hepner says. "Today, the price
from China is $3.50."
No one can compete with that. So most Western producers of vitamin C
have shut down.
That's globalization. But there's a hidden price for cheap goods.
Earlier this year, lead-contaminated multivitamins showed up on the
shelves of U.S. retailers. And this spring, vitamin A from China
contaminated with dangerous bacteria nearly ended up in European baby
food.
It's bound to happen more often. Hubbard says the agency is overwhelmed
by the rising tide of imports.
"When I came to the FDA in the 1970s, the food program was almost half
of the FDA's budget. Today, it's only a quarter," Hubbard says.
Experts say the FDA has about 650 food inspectors to cover 60,000
domestic food producers and 418 ports of entry.
The agency plans to close nearly half of its 13 food-testing labs.
All that means food safety depends on the vigilance of food companies
operating in a fast-changing world. Many companies may not know much
about their suppliers.
Earlier this month, the FDA wrote a letter to food manufacturers
reminding them of their legal responsibility to make sure all the
ingredients they use are safe. Don't depend on FDA testing, the letter
says.
Jean Halloran agrees. She's director of food safety for Consumers Union,
which publishes Consumer Reports. She has some advice for food
companies.
"I think you have a responsibility to get on a plane and go over there,
and see the plant where that's being manufactured, so that you can see
for yourself whether there's a polluted water supply coming into the
facility, whether lead-bearing paint chips might be falling into the
vats of whatever you're purchasing," she says.
But consumers who want to find out where food is coming from or what
American companies are doing to safeguard it might not have much luck.
Four years ago, Congress passed a law requiring food to be labeled for
its country-of-origin. But that doesn't extend to individual food
ingredients.
And when NPR asked major food companies where they get their ingredients
and how they test them, companies either didn't respond or said those
matters are proprietary secrets.
Michael Doyle heads the Center for Food Safety at the University of
Georgia and consults for Con-Agra, a leading food producer. He says
there's a lot of variation in companies' trustworthiness.
"Some of the major brand companies I know are very proactive in
addressing food safety," he says. "Some others are not."
Often, he says, consumers have to take a company's word that its food is
safe.
"And unfortunately, that's what the FDA has to do, too," Doyle says.
Global Health
Q&A: Why China Tops the FDA Import Refusal List
Deadly additives found in pet food has launched a wider FDA
investigation into food and food ingredient imports from China
The discovery of the chemical melamine in U.S. pet and livestock food
earlier this spring has triggered a wider FDA investigation into the
possible contamination of food imports from China. The tainted pet food
is blamed for killing cats and dogs in the United States, and has been
traced to two Chinese manufacturers who added the chemical — used to
make plastics and sterilize swimming pools — to wheat and rice products
to make them appear protein-rich.
William Hubbard, former senior associate commissioner for policy,
planning and legislation at the FDA, now works with the nonprofit,
nonpartisan Coalition for a Stronger FDA. Here, Hubbard explains why the
FDA's focus is increasingly on China, and whether consumers should
worry.
The FDA has a system in place for inspecting food imports; why didn't it
catch the melamine contamination?
There has been a tremendous increase in recent years in importations of
foods and particularly food ingredients. And in many cases, those foods
ingredients are coming from developing countries that do not have a
strong food-safety inspection system. So the concern is that if the FDA
can't look at those food ingredients, they are basically getting through
freely.
Unfortunately, with 13 million food imports last year and only several
hundred inspectors, the FDA was able to look at only about 1 percent of
shipments at U.S. ports. And it rarely looks at food ingredients at all
– such as the Chinese imports of wheat gluten (a protein in wheat)
associated with the melamine contamination.
The FDA keeps a running list on its Web site of food imports it has
rejected at U.S. ports, and the reasons. China consistently tops that
list. Why?
China's export market for food ingredients has zoomed up in recent
years. Individual shipments of food and ingredient exports from China to
the United States have gone from 82,000 in 2002 to 199,000 in 2006. And
I'm told by FDA officials that they're rapidly reaching up to 300,000
this year.
What are some of the reasons the FDA has refused imports from China?
A very common description will be illegal animal drugs, and what that
means is a processor has given seafood — say fish — an illegal drug to
treat either a bacterial or fungal infection or both. The common ones
are malachite green for fungal infections or fluoroquinolones for
antibiotic infections. These fish are often raised in polluted water, so
they're given these drugs to treat them. The problem is, when these fish
arrive in the United States, their tissue contains these illegal drugs.
So the FDA attempts to identify shipments with these drugs and keep them
out.
What is the problem for humans who eat fish with these residues of
antibiotics or antifungals?
They can certainly contribute to antibiotic resistance, and in some
cases, they can cause direct health effects, such as anemia. These are
drugs that are not approved in the United States for use in these
commodities, and they're viewed as dangerous, so the FDA attempts to
keep them out. When a foreign processor is using them to make their fish
stay alive, that's clearly a violation of U.S. law. But the FDA can't go
to that country and force them to change their practices.
Why not?
The FDA has no authority to require a foreign country to send us safe
food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture can do that for meat. The USDA
can say to a foreign exporter of meat, "You must show us that you are
making safe meat before you even put it on the boat." But for the FDA,
all the responsibility is on the agency to find the problem at the port.
And when you have so few inspectors, many problems don't get found.
Some might say, "We aren't seeing a lot of people getting sick and dying
because of bad food and pharmaceutical imports." Are we being alarmists?
In the case of pharmaceuticals, there's the recent example of diethylene
glycol poisoning, which has been blamed for sickening adults and
children around the world, even causing deaths.* It's been traced back
to a Chinese firm that apparently substituted a chemical used in
antifreeze for pharmaceutical-grade glycerine, which is a sweet-tasting
thickener used in elixirs like cough syrup and toothpaste.
Should consumers be concerned?
You certainly need to know that many ingredients and foods are coming
from other countries. But I think the food supply is safe. I think we
can continue to consume our food with confidence. But the fear is that
these examples are markers for an ever-increasing problem. And when you
have what some consider a weak FDA, then that actually gives foreign
exporters incentives to send us their bad stuff.
How do the FDA port inspectors decide what to look at?
They attempt to use a risk-assessment process that examines problems
from a given country in the past or a given food in the past or a given
importer in the past. That helps the FDA to target places that have been
more problematic before — so they're not taking time with, say, frozen
fish from Norway, which perhaps has never been a problem. Seafood from
China, however, has been a persistent problem.
Why hasn't the FDA been inspecting shipments of food ingredients?
I don't think anyone was seeing the problem until the melamine
contamination happened. And the FDA's resources are so stretched that it
had to focus on where there had been historical problems, such as
seafood and cheeses and other things. Now that the melamine problem has
arisen, the FDA will have to shift resources to look at ingredients.
Unfortunately, however, that means it will shift resources away from
inspecting dairy products or seafood.
Given the potential level of contamination, can't U.S. manufacturers
just stop buying animal or human food from China?
The reports are that the Chinese are selling these ingredients at very
low cost. And some reports suggest that they're attempting to
essentially capture the market in many cases. For instance, a very
common preservative in all of our processed food is something called
ascorbic acid – vitamin C. And I understand that 80 percent of the
world's ascorbic acid is now made in China.
Are you saying manufacturers can't afford to go elsewhere for these
imports, or that there isn't anywhere else to go?
Well, there's certainly the price differential. But I understand that
there's only one ascorbic acid manufacturer left in the United States.
If that's true, then that means that a processor is going to be
hard-pressed to find a domestic source of ascorbic acid. And ascorbic
acid is a safe and useful additive to preserve food.
What do you think should be done?
The government has got to step up to the plate and give the FDA more
power. The FDA should be able to say to a country, "If you keep sending
us unsafe food, we're going to embargo that food or even the entire
country until you put in place a protective system."
* According to the Associated Press, diethylene glycol
(DEG) was blamed for the deaths of at least 51 people in Panama last
year after it was mixed into cough syrup, another case with allegations
involving China. Between 1990 and 1998, similar incidents of DEG
poisoning reportedly occurred in Argentina, Bangladesh, Haiti, India and
Nigeria, killing hundreds.
While sailing the ocean near Haiti,
Christopher Columbus in 1493 reported seeing three mermaids
from a distance. The Genoese explorer was not impressed.
Up close, the sea maidens were “not as pretty as they are depicted,” he
wrote in his journal, “for somehow in the face they look like men.”
Many scientists now think that what Columbus probably saw was a manatee,
an aquatic mammal that resembles a flippered hippo.
In a new exhibition opening at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH)
here this weekend, viewers can digitally superimpose the picture of a
mermaid atop that of a manatee and see how Columbus and countless other
sailors might have been fooled.
Entitled Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids, the exhibition
traces the possible origins of some of the world’s most famous
“imaginary” beasts and also their lesser-known counterparts.
Nature and myth
“This museum has a long history of studying and presenting great stories
about the natural world and the culture of humanity,” said AMNH
president Ellen Futter at a press preview of the exhibition earlier this
week. “In this exhibition, we extend that tradition further, by looking
at the intersection of nature and culture, those moments when people
glimpse something fantastical in nature.”
The exhibition deftly combines nature and myth, paleontology and
anthropology, and delightfully campy models of mythical creatures with
real fossils.
Upon first entering the exhibition, visitors are greeted by a
17-foot-long, green, European dragon of the sort that legend says Saint
George slew. Its sinuous and colorful Chinese counterpart hangs from the
ceiling in one of the last rooms of the exhibition. In the mythical
water-creatures section, large tentacles and the head of a giant
squid-inspired kraken rise from the floor, its body mostly hidden.
An imaginary bestiary
Mythic Creatures borrows specimens and artifacts from the fossil, art
and anthropological collections of the AMNH and other museums, and
examines how such objects might have—through imagination,
misidentification, speculation or outright deception—given birth to
fantastical creatures.
“Faced with awesome nature, our imaginations might create something to
be revered, something beautiful, something to be gently feared or
something simply whimsical and playful, perhaps even magical,” Futter
said. “I trust that this exhibition will show you a little of all of
these.”
Visitors can touch a real narwhal tusk, which for centuries many
Europeans accepted as proof of the unicorn’s existence. Or glimpse the
beaked skull of a protoceratop dinosaur, one of the fossil animals that
practically litter the Gobi Desert even today, and which traders long
ago might have mistaken for the remains of a griffin—a mythical creature
with the head and forelimbs of an eagle and the body of a lion.
The exhibition makes a convincing argument for why the same creatures
pop up in the stories of cultures separated by great spans of time and
distance. Mermaids, for example, were probably born in the minds of
lonely European sailors, and as their boats touched shore around the
world, the image of the half-woman, half-fish creature spread, often
becoming intermixed with local beliefs.
“This is a really intriguing form—the idea of a beautiful woman who also
lives in the water,” Laurel Kendall, one of the museum’s anthropology
curators, told LiveScience. “People who have water goddesses, it seems
when they encounter the image of the mermaid, [they find] this is a
great way to represent them.”
Trivia
Mythic Creatures introduces visitors to imaginary beasts most of us have
probably never heard of. There is the Japanese “Kappa,” a green
monkey-faced creature that had an appetite for children and cucumbers.
Kappas lived in ponds but occasionally walked on land. They had
bowl-shaped indentations on their heads, where they kept a shallow pool
of pond water that was the source of their power. Travelers encountering
a Kappa late at night were advised to bow; when the Kappa bowed in turn,
it would spill its water and, powerless, scurry back to its pond.
The exhibition is also a rich source of mythical creatures’ trivia.
Visitors can learn, for example, that, according to Marco Polo, Genghis
Khan possessed the feather of a Roc—a mythical giant bird said to dine
on elephants—but that Polo’s translator, Sir Henry Yule, suspected the
feather was only a palm-tree frond.
And, according to the exhibition, not everyone agreed with Columbus
about mermaids. Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame reported that a
mermaid he once glimpsed was “by no means unattractive.”
Whether homely or beautiful, the monsters and beasts that once haunted
the collective imaginations of our ancestors are given new life in
Mythic Creatures.
The exhibition will run from May 26, 2007, to January 6, 2008
NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York's famed Saks Fifth Avenue
department store plans to open a shoe department so big it has been
granted its own ZIP code, 10022-SHOE, the company said on Thursday.
Saks said it plans to nearly double the number of shoes for sale and
take over the entire eighth floor of its flagship store in Manhattan.
The expanded department will open in September under the name
10022-SHOE.
"10022-SHOE will also hold a place in U.S. history as the first floor to
be granted its own designated ZIP code by the United States Post
Office," Saks said in a statement.
The news may delight women with shoe obsessions to rival that of former
Philippines first lady Imelda Marcos.
"Visitors to the new eighth floor will be greeted by a seemingly endless
array of shoes," the statement said.
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