The Food and Drug Administration never inspected a Chinese plant that was making the blood thinner heparin. The result is around 20 deaths and example 1A of an agency crying out for more staff and a strategy to deal with testing drug imports. 

The FDA has since directed some of its meager resources to finding out exactly what was in the heparin. The Washington Post’s Marc Kaufman reports that the agency has now identified the contaminant as a modified form of a dietary supplement, which could have enabled the product to be produced more cheaply.  Read Kaufman here.    MB

Comment RSS - Trackback URI