Silflay Hraka

Me put diethylene glycol in your children’s toothpaste.

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.

Toothpaste containing the toxic solvent was also found in Panama and Australia in the last week.

Why diethylene glycol.?

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.

“You know, if you’re in the export market, the margins are small, so people use the substitute,” he said. “Even one percent or half a percent price difference can matter to people here.

David Bodanis would beg to differ. Here’s an excerpt from his Secret House

But what’s in this toothpaste?

Water mostly, 30 to 45 percent in most brands: ordinary, everyday simple tap water. It’s there because people like to have a big gob of toothpaste to spread on the brush, and water is the cheapest stuff there is when it comes to making big gobs. Dripping a fit from the tap into your brush would cost virtually nothing; whipped in with the rest of the toothpaste the manufacturers can sell it at a neat and accountant-pleasing $2 per pound of equivalent. Toothpaste manufacture is a very lucrative occupation.

Who’s at risk?

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.”

Again, someone begs to differ. In this case the Commission on Human Rights.

To this sombre picture of the health situation in Haiti should be added the tragic affair of the contaminated syrups, which caused the deaths of almost 80 Haitian children. As soon as the deaths of the first victims were announced, the Minister of Health published a statement urging the population immediately to cease using “Afebrile” and “Valadon” syrups, and calling for their removal from all pharmacies. Most of the cases were reported in Port-au-Prince, but there were also cases in seven other areas. The ages of the victims ranged from 1 month to 13 years. Laboratory examinations, conducted with the assistance of John Hopkins University, established that death had been caused by the toxic substance, diethylene glycol.

ProMed Mail would also disagree.

It now appears as though contamination/adulteration of an expectorant syrup with diethylene glycol is considered the definitive etiology of the “acute syndrome of unexpected renal insufficiency” in Panama. The present case count is 44 with 21 associated deaths. From the background information in the newswire [1], it appears as though there had been a similar occurrence in the early 1960s, with about 15 reported deaths.