The Everyman Who Exposed
Tainted Toothpaste
By Walt Bogdanich
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, Mr. 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.
Mr. 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 — Mr.
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,
Dr. 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.”
Mr. 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,” Mr. Arias said.
A year ago, those words
would have meant nothing
to him. “Nobody had ever
heard of this stuff,”
Mr. 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
Mr. Arias, who has a
midlevel government job
reviewing environmental
reports.
Mr. 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.
Mr. 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, Mr. Arias
said he was given a form
to fill out. He left
wondering what if
anything would come of
his complaint.
Mr. 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 Dr. 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,” Mr. 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.
|
