Re: Return from China

From: Phil Osborn (philosborn@altavista.com)
Date: Sat Jan 05 2002 - 16:07:58 MST


On Friday 04 January 2002 00:49, Phil Osborn wrote:
> When we read about the Chinese business that ran out of ethyl alcohol for
> its children's cough syrup and substituted methyl or some other highly
> toxic alcohol, with the result being that at least 80 children - on one of
> the poorest Caribbean islands - Haiti, I think - died, we are not
> surprised. It's what we expect.

On Thu Jan 03 2002 - 23:06:50 MST, Randall Randall <wolfkin@freedomspace.net> wrote

Do you have a reference for this?

Google had only four results on
"caribbean ethyl methyl alcohol cough syrup", and none of them was about this.

This particularly concerns me as I live in the Caribbean (though I'm in Canada at the moment), and most of the products I see in the store at
home are imported directly from China, since it's cheap.

Phil Osborn replies:

Sorry, this was in the local papers within the past few years. Anyway, I think that the actual chemical was ethylene glycol, as I seem to recall that it was the variety of alcohol used in anti-freeze. (I'm not a chemist..).

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