Hugh Hewitt has been on this issue for awhile, he still gets email from doctors who hadn’t realized there was a problem with the drug. I think drug companies should seriously think about moving their drug operation back to America or other countries that share our laws regarding drug safety.

On a dusty lane in east China, a small factory sitting amid strawberry and vegetable fields processes chemicals from pig guts into heparin, a commonly used blood thinner linked to 62 deaths and hundreds of allergic reactions in the U.S. and Germany.

The mysterious problems with heparin from the factory and others like it — China’s deadliest product quality scandal since Chinese cough syrup killed 93 people in Central America a year ago — dramatically illustrate the perils of shifting drug production offshore.
With recalls of heparin products now in six countries, it is an issue that regulators are scrambling to address.
In the past month, China’s drug safety agency has ordered tighter controls on heparin production. That followed a U.S. Food and Drug Administration order requiring all heparin imports to be tested. The FDA also announced plans to station eight regulators in China and hire five Chinese to work with them.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of problems with sensitive drugs,” said Dr. Bryan Liang, an adviser to the Partnership for Safe Medicines, an American group working to promote drug safety. “The problem is only going to get worse as more materials come from suspect sources.”
About 40 percent of pharmaceuticals and 80 percent of the chemical ingredients in drugs are imported, according to U.S. government statistics. A growing share comes from developing countries such as China, India and Mexico that are still building their own drug safety systems.

[…]
Baxter recalled nearly all its U.S. heparin injections, as have several other companies.
[…]
The FDA says a contaminant, identified as “oversulfated chondroitin sulfate,” accounted for up to half of the active ingredient in some batches of heparin from the factory, known as Changzhou SPL. It has yet to confirm, though, whether the contaminant caused the allergic reactions.
Chondroitin sulfate, usually made of animal or shark cartilage, is used as a food supplement for joint pain. It is more than seven times cheaper than heparin, which might tempt suppliers somewhere along the production chain to substitute it. And its chemical similarity to heparin makes it hard to spot, the FDA said.
[…]
“We have an increasingly globalized supply chain,” said James Shen, publisher of the industry newsletter Pharma China. “The Chinese are now major suppliers of bulk pharmaceuticals and also supply intermediate chemicals for drugs.”

Since I first learned about this on Hugh Hewitt’s show, I’ve been wondering if the doctors warn their patients that Heparin contains pig. I would think that Jews and Muslims would want to avoid it since it would be considered unclean.