The Portrait of a Shameful "Olympic Host" : A True Story about Chinese
Tainted Exports -- The everyman who exposed tainted toothpaste

International Herald Tribune

The everyman who exposed tainted toothpaste

By Walt Bogdanich
Sunday, September 30, 2007

PANAMA: Eduardo Arias hardly fits the profile of someone capable of
humbling one of the world's most formidable economic powers.

A 51-year-old Kuna Indian, Arias grew up on a reservation paddling
dugout canoes near his home on one of the San Blas islands off Panama's
Caribbean coast. He now lives in a small apartment above a food stand in
Panama, the nation's capital, also known as Panama City.

But one Saturday morning in May, Eduardo Arias did something that would
reverberate across six continents. He read the label on a 59-cent tube
of toothpaste. On it were two words that had been overlooked by
government inspectors and health authorities in dozens of countries:
diethylene glycol, the same sweet-tasting, poisonous ingredient in
antifreeze that had been mixed into cold syrup here, killing or
disabling at least 138 Panamanians last year.

Arias reported his discovery, setting off a worldwide hunt for tainted
toothpaste that turned out to be manufactured in China. Health alerts
have now been issued in 34 countries, from Vietnam to Kenya, from Tonga
in the Pacific to Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean. Canada found 24
contaminated brands and New Zealand found 16. Japan had 20 million
tubes. Officials in the United States unwittingly gave the toothpaste to
prisoners, the mentally disabled and troubled youths. Hospitals gave it
to the sick, while high-end hotels gave it to the wealthy.

People around the world had been putting an ingredient of antifreeze in
their mouths and until Panama blew the whistle, no one seemed to know it.

The toothpaste scare helped galvanize global concerns about the quality
of China's exports in general, prompting the government there to promise
to reform how food, medicine and consumer products are regulated. And
other countries are re-examining how well they monitor imported products.

Lost in this swirl of activity was the identity of the person who
started it all ― Arias. Until The New York Times tracked him down with
the help of the Panama City mayor's office, his name had not been known,
even to some people working on the case. "We haven't been able to find
him," said Julio César Laffaurie, the Panamanian prosecutor pursuing the
case of the contaminated toothpaste.

In looking back over events of the past year, Jorge Motta, director of
the Gorgas Memorial Institute, a prominent research center in Panama
City, said he was grateful that some good had come from the national
trauma brought on by the toxic cough syrup.

"The whole questioning about Chinese goods began in Panama with our
deaths," he said, putting a twist on an old Chinese saying by adding, "A
little butterfly in Panama beat her wings and created a storm in China."

Arias, who lives alone and does not own a car, went to buy blank CDs on
May 5 at Vendela, a discount store where he had heard prices were so low
that street vendors bought supplies there. Stepping into the store, a
large display of toothpaste caught his eye.

"Without touching the tube, the letters were big enough for me to read:
diethylene glycol," Arias said.

A year ago, those words would have meant nothing to him. "Nobody had
ever heard of this stuff," Arias said. But a steady drumbeat of news
about poison cough syrup had engraved the words in his mind.

"It was inconceivable to me that a known toxic substance that killed all
these people could be openly on sale and that people would go on about
their business calmly, selling and buying this stuff," said Arias, who
has a midlevel government job reviewing environmental reports.

Arias thought about alerting the store clerk but figured nothing would
come of it. Instead, he bought a tube with the plan of turning it over
to the health authorities. It was not easy.

Since government offices were closed on the weekend, he said, he used a
vacation day on Monday to walk the tube to the nearest Health Ministry
office. But that office refused to accept it, directing him to a second
health center.

Arias walked there and found himself in a crowded office. "It's always
filled with people who are seeking medical attention," he said. The
clerk there directed him to another section of the building where he
spoke to another official.

"I said, look, here is this toothpaste I bought on the pedestrian mall,"
he said he told the official, "and it says right here ― it's got
diethylene glycol."

The official told him he needed to take the toothpaste to a third health
center, this one much farther away. "I said, wait, wait, do I have to
walk all the way over there?" he recalled. "Can't I give it to you and
make the complaint here?"

At this point, Arias said he was given a form to fill out. He left
wondering what if anything would come of his complaint.

Arias got his answer three days later when the nation's top health
official, Dr. Camilo Alleyne, announced that toothpaste containing
diethylene glycol had been found by an unidentified shopper in Panama City.

The news set off alarms. In 2006 the government had mistakenly mixed
mislabeled diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine, and
Panama was still coping with its aftermath. The day before Alleyne's
announcement, a front-page newspaper article here reported the finding
by The Times that the diethylene glycol in the cold medicine had come
from a Chinese company not certified to sell pharmaceutical ingredients,
and that it had been sold under a false label.

Over the years, counterfeiters have used diethylene glycol as a cheap
substitute for its more expensive chemical cousin, glycerin, a common
ingredient in medicine, food and household products.

Could the suspect toothpaste have come from China as well, investigators
wanted to know? And how did it enter the country unnoticed?

"Under no circumstances were we ever going to let another incident such
as happened last year happen again," said Eric Conte, a top drug
official at the Panamanian Health Ministry.

The label did not list its origin. "There was stuff in English, how to
brush your teeth, and there was a list of ingredients," Conte said.
Markings suggested that it came from Germany, but the authorities were
skeptical.

"We had a good idea where it came from," said Reynaldo Lee, director of
the national food protection agency. He suspected China, and shipping
records proved him right.

The toothpaste had entered Panama through the Colón Free Trade Zone on
the Atlantic side of the Panama Canal. One of the world's biggest free
zones, with 30,000 workers and 2,500 businesses, it is a place where
billions of dollars in goods are unloaded, stored and either sold or
reshipped free of tariffs. From there, 5,000 to 6,000 tubes slipped into
the Panamanian market, without proper certification, mixed in with
animal products, investigators said. A much larger number of tubes were
reshipped from the free zone to other Latin American countries.

But it was not until the United States disclosed June 1 that tainted
tubes had penetrated its borders that the hunt intensified, a task that
grew more difficult when investigators discovered that some contaminated
toothpaste did not list diethylene glycol on the label.

Even two well-known brands, Colgate and Sensodyne, got caught up in the
sweep when counterfeiters were found to be selling toothpaste with
antifreeze under their names. Some fake Colgate tubes also contained
potentially harmful bacteria, according to a statement from Health
Canada, the national health agency.

"Consumers should seal the tube and put the tube in a sealed bag,"
Canadian officials advised. Investigators told The Times that both
counterfeit brands came from China.

As the complaints mounted, China's government defended legitimate
manufacturers that used diethylene glycol as a thickening agent in
toothpaste, saying it had caused no health problems among Chinese consumers.

Officials outside China took a different view. "They should apologize to
the world, and not say that it is not dangerous" said Dora Akunyili, who
runs the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control in
Nigeria. "This is ridiculous."

Like Panama, Nigeria had its own lethal encounter with diethylene glycol
when dozens of children died in 1990 from medicine that also contained
the poison.

In laboratory tests, Canadian authorities found diethylene glycol
concentrations of nearly 14 percent in Chinese toothpaste ― about twice
the level of poison detected in the deadly Panamanian cough syrup.

"While toothpaste is not meant to be swallowed, it is often swallowed by
young children," Health Canada warned. Action against Chinese toothpaste
is continuing. In late September, Brunei and Australia announced bans on
toothpaste containing unacceptable levels of diethylene glycol.

As reports from around the world mounted, Chinese officials showed they
were not immune to the criticism. When the makers of Sensodyne tracked
counterfeit toothpaste through the Dubai Free Trade Zone to a factory in
Shejiang Province in China, regulators there shut it down, a spokesman
for Sensodyne said. The government also closed the chemical company that
made the poison used in the toxic Panamanian cough syrup.

And in July, China ordered its manufacturers to stop using diethylene
glycol in toothpaste.

The decision generated news coverage around the world. The name Eduardo
Arias was nowhere to be found. He did not seem to mind.

"At least I contributed something," he said.

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