Food and Medicine and China

Worries About What You Use From China

(This is a column I wrote early 2020 just as the pandemic was breaking out. Information is now more important than ever.)

February 1 2020

Let me be entirely transparent here. I love Chinese food and I especially love Chinese buffets at local restaurants. But would I eat food from a Chinese street market or one that is identifed as a “wet” market? Absolutely not, although there is no danger of my ever being close to such places. Wet markets, in case that’s a new term to you as it was to me, are places that sell dead and live animals out in the open to be used for food and medicine. This includes poultry, fish, reptiles, and pigs (and sometimes other items that our palates would deem to be too gross for human consumption).

By now, you’ve all heard the rumors about the coronavirus being caused by the Chinese habit of eating bats and other disgusting creatures. The video which has gone viral on Facebook has been debunked as not even taking place in Wuhan at all where bat isn’t a delicacy. It actually featured the host of an online travel show eating a whole bat in Palau, a Pacific Island nation, as part of food shows where American chefs and travel hosts have shown in the past.

In an article written by James Palmer a senior editor at Foreign Policy on January 27, he states that although the virus, at present, does seem to have originated in bats, it’s unclear how it made its way to humans.

I am once again being more careful about reading the fine print on certain packaged food items and I won’t buy anything that contains food with a reference to China. But I have been doing that for years especially since the pet food scare and the infant formula scare of several years ago.

So I can pretty much avoid eating food prepared and sold on the streets of China, but I have to take certain pharmaceutical drugs just to lower my constant pain to a level where I can make it through the days. And many of you are even more dependent on medicines to treat life-threatening physical conditions.

I don’t have space to elaborate on the threat we all face from our medicines which are made mostly in China and India but I am going to use brief talking points for the rest of this column just to give you something to think about or research on your own.

Remember the recent headlines last fall about carcinogen-tainted blood pressure medication? The FDA says its regulatory system of data review and inspections is effective, but a leading data analytics firm shows violations of data integrity continue to happen in China and India where our FDA investigators announce inspections ahead of time which gives plants time to clean up any evidence of unsanitary conditions or wrongdoing. Here in the States, FDA inspectors show up unannounced for inspections. In 2014 when the FDA experimented by giving Indian drug manufacturers no advance notice, serious violations rose by almost 60%.

In January 2019 at indoco Remedies in India, the manufacturing plant faked the data to justify the release to market of the diabetes drug glimepiride. It was found to not meet quality standards and should not have been released to patients.

At a Cleveland Clinic, heart transplant patients ended up suffering organ rejection after taking an ineffective Indian-made immunosuppressant.

We certainly need more affordable medicines, but at what risk to us? To ensure high quality the FDA should end its practice of advance notice inspections. Prescription drug labels aren’t required to inform you about where your drugs are made. Roughly 80% of the drugs sold here originate from India or China.

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