The Deaths that Came from China

Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.
Paracelsus

The more hidden the venom, the more dangerous it is.
Marguerite de Valois

For greed all nature is too little.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca


In September of 2006, a wave of panic swept across Panama as reports of an alarming number of mysterious deaths began to flood the local media. At first, the deaths were attributed to kidney failure; soon afterward, though, bewildered spokespersons of the Ministerio de Salud (Ministry of Health) reported that the nervous systems of afflicted patients were shutting down for no apparent reason. Medical professionals scrambled frantically to determine the cause of the deaths and, ultimately, these were traced back to a cough syrup that had been distributed across the nation through clinics of the Seguro Social—Panama’s public health care system.

And to date, nearly nine months after the tragedy first surfaced, three hundred and sixty-five deaths have been attributed to the tainted cough syrup. These deaths occurred exclusively among Panamá’s working class, who usually cannot afford private medical care and have to fill their prescriptions at pharmacies that belong to the Seguro Social.

What investigators eventually determined was that the fatal cough syrup contained diethylene glycol—a solvent, dangerous to humans, that is commonly used in automobile coolant and antifreeze.

Walt Bogdanich and Jake Hooker—journalists reporting for The New York Times—helped world health authorities trace the culprits of the poisonings back to China. While covering the Panamá story, they also discovered that since 1992 that there have been several thousand other victims whose deaths are also due to the use of diethylene glycol in cough syrup. These tragedies occurred in Haiti, Bangladesh, Argentina, India, and China.

In a remarkably short period of time, the Chinese have become leaders in supplying the world with low-cost chemical products. Because of China’s vertiginous economic expansion, health and safety regulations for medical goods have tended to lag far behind the standards of the developed world. But those responsible for the exportation of death from China have only been a handful of unscrupulous entrepreneurs—they substituted diethylene glycol for the far more costly glycerin—who have taken advantage of this gap in safe commercial practices in order to make huge profits.

Three-hundred and sixty-five Panamanians—and possibly more—have succumbed to their greed. And, personally, the thought of ingesting cough syrup from a contaminated batch has hit close to home.

My wife and I love visiting Panamá city’s old Chinatown. It’s off of Avenida B, near Sal Si Puedes, in the sector of Santa Ana. There, shoppers will find friendly store-owners who sell a wide assortment of products from China at reasonable prices.

Among the items I like to purchase in old Chinatown is cough syrup. The English translation on the box—a poor, yet enchanting, translation—assures me that, in addition to ridding me of my cough, if I take a spoonful of syrup every day I will live a long and vigorous life. But I only use the cough medicine when I’m suffering from a cold. I find that this cough syrup, in addition to delivering the promised results, costs merely a fraction of name-brand cold medicines.

Recently, at the onset of the rainy season, I caught a bad cold, with a hacking cough. And in spite of my newfound fears of cough medicines that come from China, in a death-defying leap of faith I bought a new bottle of my favorite cold medicine, placing my trust in the fact that I hadn’t heard of a single death by poisoning in Panama’s sizeable Chinese community.

Nevertheless, I confess that in light of the recent tragedies—in Panama as well as in the rest of the world—during my recent bout with the common cold, my favorite remedy, the one that has help me deal with coughing for several years now, has become much harder to swallow.