Angry in the Great White North

Chinese death exports continue to be discovered. Now it's poisonous toothpaste:

Chinese authorities are investigating whether two companies from this coastal region exported tainted toothpaste as more contaminated product, including some made for children, has turned up in Latin America.

A team of government investigators arrived here Sunday afternoon and closed the factory of the Danyang City Success Household Chemical Company, a small building housing about 30 workers in a nearby village, according to villagers and one factory worker. The government also questioned the manager of another toothpaste maker, Goldcredit International Trading, which is in Wuxi, about an hour’s drive southeast of here.

No tainted toothpaste has been found in the United States, but a spokesman for the Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that the agency would be taking “a hard look” at whether to issue an import alert.

The last thing the Chinese government needs is anyone taking "a hard look" at anything they ship.

After the nightmare of the pet food recall, and the discovery of poisonous cough syrop killing children in Panama, and the focus on China's horrid quality record, the discovery that something as innocuous as toothpaste could kill is almost anticlimactic.

But then it turns out that the poison was being market at children, and the interest is piqued:

Authorities in the Dominican Republic said they seized 36,000 tubes of toothpaste suspected of containing diethylene glycol, an industrial solvent and prime ingredient in some antifreeze. Included were tubes of toothpaste marketed for children with bubble gum and strawberry flavors sold under the name of “Mr. Cool Junior.”

Diethylene glycol is the same poison that the Panamanian government unwittingly mixed into cold medicine last year, killing at least 100 people. In that case, the poison falsely labeled as glycerin, a harmless syrup, originated in China, shipping records show. Diethylene glycol is generally less expensive than its chemical cousin glycerin.

Panamanian authorities said they believed the tainted toothpaste found in their country, containing up to 4.6 percent diethylene glycol, came from China.

The response from the Chinese? We didn't do it, and in any case, everyone does it:

“We didn’t do this; we didn’t make the bad stuff,” said Shi Lei, a manager at Danyang City Success. “It was probably someone else.“

But Ms. Shi and other toothpaste makers in this region said that diethylene glycol had been used in toothpaste in China for years and that producers believed it was not very harmful.

Right. Follow that up with the standard "We didn't sent it to you" line:

Indeed, the government seems to have responded quickly to reports last weekend about contaminated toothpaste. Hu Keyu, the manager at Goldcredit International, said investigators had talked to him over the weekend because his company was the first to sell and export toothpaste under the brand label Mr. Cool. But he and his staff insisted that Goldcredit never exported to Panama, and that this year the company had exported only a small amount of Mr. Cool toothpaste to Australia.

Ah, good, now the Australians have an excuse to get involved.

Mr. Hu said his company exports toothpaste, toothbrushes, glue and other goods to the United States, Europe and other regions but that his company no longer uses diethylene glycol. He said, however, that most toothpaste makers in this region use diethylene glycol because it is considered a cheap substitute for glycerin.

Mr. Hu at Goldcredit said that while he did not produce the toothpaste shipped to Panama, diethylene glycol had been used for years at very low levels in Chinese toothpaste as a glycerin substitute. “If diethylene glycol were poisonous,” he said, “all Chinese people would have been poisoned.”

Right, we don't do bad things anymore, not that it was bad to start with, and everyone else is doing it, so blame them, though we don't know what the big deal is, because it isn't bad, not that we do it. Did I mention we don't do this not-reaaly-a-bad-thing anymore?

What other goodies does Goldcredit not export anywhere?

Arts & crafts: glue stick, face paint, paint, white glue, pencil, tattoo pen and eraser

Toothbrush: we have more than 200 kinds of toothbrushes

Toothpaste: we can product many kinds of toothpastes

Wet wipe: baby wipes, cosmetic wipes, ladies' wet wipers, disinfecting wipes, anti-bacteria wipes, clean wipes, skin care wet wipes, glass wipes and bathroom wipes

Facepaint? Baby wipes?

I don't know if the economics of this works, but let's shut the doors on Chinese exports. Maybe the increase in cost of products will be compensated in three ways:

• Since the goods we buy will be made far closer to home, transport costs are lower (with all the extra benefits from the reduction in pollution from transportation)
• When it comes to durable goods (furniture, kitchenware, toys, whatever), the increase cost is offset by the fact that the goods are better quality and so last longer, meaning goods are purchased less often, and costs of disposal are reduced (leaving poisonous Chinese garbage in China is the ultimate in landfill waste diversion)
• Life insurance premiums are lowered as we've eliminated one of those systemic threats to our health and well-being

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