Source:
NY TimesThe Food and Drug Administration said Friday that all heparin products being imported into the United States would be stopped and tested for a possibly dangerous contaminant. The action comes after the agency’s inspectors in China found the contaminant in 20 of the 28 lots of the drug’s active ingredient inside a plant that supplied it to much of the American market.
The still-unidentified contaminant, which the F.D.A. described as a heparin-like substance that mimics the real drug, was discovered last week in heparin manufactured in the United States by Baxter International. Heparin has been linked to 19 deaths and hundreds of severe allergic reactions in the United States.
Germany has reported allergic reactions in 80 patients using heparin there, and investigators were testing all heparin made with Chinese ingredients to determine if it contained the same contaminant found in American supplies. Other countries have begun or are about to begin similar testing.
“There is now a worldwide testing effort going on,” said Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the F.D.A.’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “We are going to have a lot of information and get a much better understanding of what the global heparin situation is like within a week or so.”
NY TimesRead more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/15/health/policy/15fda.html?pagewanted=print
In that, 'we' have a 'history' with tainted blood products, the FDA should be able to resolve this problem and protect the American public?
Arkansas Prison Blood ScandalThe Arkansas
prison blood scandal resulted from the state’s selling plasma extracted from prisoners at the Cummins Unit of the Arkansas Department of Correction (ADC). Corruption among the administrators of the prison blood program and poor supervision resulted in
disease-tainted blood, often carrying hepatitis or HIV, knowingly being shipped to
blood brokers, who in turn shipped it to Canada, Europe, and Asia. Revelation of the misdeeds and the healthcare crisis it created in Canada nearly brought down the Liberal Party government in 1997. In 1994, Arkansas became the last state to stop selling plasma extracted from prisoners....
In 1985, the Arkansas Board of Corrections hired the Institute for Law and Policy Planning (ILPP) in Berkeley, California, to conduct an independent investigation into HMA’s practices....
The prison plasma program ended in 1994, but its effects linger. More than 1,000 Canadians who received plasma contaminated by that drawn from Arkansas prisoners were infected with HIV and 20,000 with hepatitis C. As a result of the report by Canadian Justice Horace Krever, that country’s Red Cross was stripped of its responsibility for the nation’s blood system;
on May 30, 2005, the Canadian Red Cross pleaded guilty in Ontario Superior Court for its role in the scandal....
In England, Lord Peter Archer of Sandwell began,
in March 2007, a public inquiry into contaminated blood given to British hemophilia patients in the 1970s and 1980s.
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