The next time that employees at Xiamen Origin Biotech want to lie to regulators about what they are doing, they may want to make sure that the doors to nearby rooms are closed.
During an inspection last January of its facilities in the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian, an employee told a US Food and Drug Administration inspector that the company did not keep any drugs on location. But while they reviewed company operations in a conference room, the inspector happened to notice that an adjacent room was being used to warehouse relabeled medicines.
The same Xiamen employee also thought nothing of telling the inspector that the company had stopped relabeling drugs in January 2015. But during the inspection, the FDA staffer reviewed a list of exported drugs that showed Xiamen had distributed them until January 2016.
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Is China the only source of the ingrediants and medications the U.S, needs? Why are we even dealing with them?
Given Chinese suppliers of foods’ propensity for adulterating and mislabeling them it gives me the shivers to think that we’re consuming medications Chinese companies make. Who knows what they contain. Good luck trying to get sourcing information from your local megapharmacy chain, too.
Interesting stuff, however the Chinese organic supply chain needs to be put in the larger context of the bribes that Chinese officials are receiving from the much larger network of ex China companies to get their products into the distribution chains.