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Officials who hid rash of DEG deaths still protected

Government responds to China toxin scandals with raids here

by Eric Jackson

Chinese industry has taken a public relations beating lately, not only for putting mislabeled poisonous diethylene glyclol (DEG) into a chain of commerce that ended up in Panama's government-made medicines, but also for marketing other contaminants that ended up killing pets in North America and people in China itself. The Beijing government has been arresting some of the guilty and rounding up scapegoats who may have little or nothing to do with the problems. It's likely that death penalties will be imposed there before the series of scandals runs its course.

Meanwhile in Panama fingers are being pointed by prosecutors and others not only at the chain of companies along the commercial trail by which DEG labeled as glycerin ended up in Seguro Social cough syrup bottles. Also facing the wrath of this country's law enforcement authorities are the purveyors of certain Chinese toothpastes known or suspected to contain DEG, and of sunscreens made with or containing the substance. Such products have been seized in the course of a wave of raids against mainly Chinese-owned businesses that were selling either unregistered health care products or foods without the legally required Spanish-language labels affixed.

Although there are still pending prosecutions of low-level Seguro Social officials who worked at the lab where the cough medicines that killed more than 100 people were mixed, it's still taboo for investigators to ask what Health Minister Camilo Alleyne and Seguro Social director René Luciani knew and when they knew it. Those questions remain relevant because there are doctors, nurses and pharmacists working in the public health care system who say that they informed their superiors of a suspcious rash of deaths and illnesses weeks before the Torrijos administration took any action about it.

The Panamanian people may not be as forgiving as the Public Ministry and President Torrijos apparently are. In a poll taken for La Prensa by Dichter & Neira, the Latin American affiliate of the Harris organization, the questions were rigged to avoid expressions of confidence or lack thereof in Alleyne or Luciani. However, 75 percent of those polled said that the Spanish wholesaler, Rasfer, that imported the DEG into Panama was not the only party responsible for the poisonings, and 79.6 percent said that they don't believe the Torrijos administration's figure of 78 deaths. (Prosecutors say they have confirmed 100 DEG deaths, another 265 cases are still under investigation and more reports are coming in from remote areas like parts of the Ngobe-Bugle Comarca.) Previous Dichter & Neira polls and surveys by other companies have indicated that strong majorities of the Panamanian people want to see Alleyne and Luciani removed from their posts, and some of the families of DEG victims are attempting to press criminal charges against the two men.

In the mainstream corporate media, threads that lead to high places in the government are largely unfollowed. PRD-aligned media like La Prensa and the commercial television networks have been going where the government points them, while the EPASA newspapers that have historically been hostile to Asians have been running headlines emphasizing the Chinese identity of tainted or unregisterd products and many of those who sell them.

The contaminated toothpastes? It wasn't registered as required by law, but at least the DEG was listed on the label. By law and as a matter of common sense that substance should not be in any product that goes into human mouths, but lab tests at the University of Panama suggest that the amounts in the toothpaste were too small to be of any medical consequence. The toothpaste affair is taking on some international consequences not only due to the worldwide publicity it has received, but also because a distributor in the Colon Free Zone re-exported the stuff abroad to the Dominican Republic and possibly to other countries.

The offending sunscreens? It's not a good idea to slather DEG on one's skin but the danger posed by tainted sunscreens seems to be mostly theoretical, except possibly for infants. Some of the seized skin products are not obscure Chinese brands but items bearing the well known Hawaiian Tropic label. Hawaiian Tropic maintains that DEG is just used in a manufacturing process that neutralizes the toxin and that nothing harmful gets absorbed through the skin when a person uses any of its products. This claim is not being directly challenged by the government, which, however, is insisting that no product meant for human consumption, whether by ingestion or by spreading on the skin, is allowed to contain DEG.

Along with the toothpaste and sunscreen scares the government has been cracking down on Chinese herbal medicines and food products, enforcing laws requiring Spanish-language ingredient labels that have been on the books but treated as dead letters for many years. One Chinese food merchant whose shelves were largely bare of products like preserved plums, hoisin sauce and Chinese mushrooms told this reporter that "we know these products, we eat them ourselves and feed them to our children, and our customers have no problem with them. The problem is with this government, which is always looking for somebody else to blame for its own faults."

The food store raids conducted with government-allied media in tow began at the Fruteria Mini Max in Paitilla, a Chinese store with lots of foods labeled in Chinese only, and others in Chinese and English but not the required Spanish, and continued at the nearby Super Kosher. In the ripple effect from those highly publicized raids both wholesale and retail food sellers began to withdraw products lacking the proper labels.

The shortage of certain food products caused by the crackdown is likely to be short-lived. Either the government will again largely ignore the food labeling laws and things will go back to more or less as they were or importers will put Spanish-language labels on foods that they'd like to market in Panamanian stores. The cost of Spanish labels may drive some prices up a bit, but once multilingual labeling is done by food processing and packing companies the cost ought to be minimal.

The crackdown on unlabeled herbal medicines, so far just carried out against Chinese herbalists and not, for example, against the people who sell traditional plant remedies at places like Calidonia's El Mercadito, might have more far-reaching effects. Off and on for many years medical groups have attacked herbalists and practitioners of indigenous and non-Western healing traditions on the grounds that they practice medicine without licenses. Because of the popularity of herbal medicines among many Panamanians of all ethnicities, ages and economic classes and due to indigenous demands for a greater degree of self-rule the objections to herbal cures have not elicited much sympathy or action from governments. Although this country's censuses don't collect data about race, ethnicity or national origin, it's believed that about five percent of the Panamanian electorate considers itself of Chinese ethnicity and a much larger minority is of at least partial Chinese ancestry, and on top of that there are many non-Chinese Panamanians who believe in and use Chinese herbs, acupunture and other Asian traditional remedies for their health problems. Because their late nemesis Arnulfo Arias purported to strip all Panamanians of Chinese ancestry of their citizenship, the PRD still tends to get most of the Chinese-Panamanian vote. Thus there are some strong political reasons that would work against the long-term suppression of Chinese herbal medicines or the trade in medicinal plants in general. However, many countries, including many Asian nations, do regulate herbal medicines and it's not inconceivable that Panama's government might adopt such policies.

For Vendela, the Avenida Central wholesaler caught distributing the unregistered DEG-containing toothpaste, the consequences of the Torrijos administration's crackdown may be more severe. The government shut that business down and slapped it with a $25,000 fine, and its employees are now complaining that the action has suddenly thrown them and their families into poverty.

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