Journey of tainted toothpaste ends in Ga. jail

updated 10:03 p.m. ET Aug. 9, 2007

ATLANTA - Each week, prison guards brought Sherri Painter a fresh tube of SpringFresh toothpaste. She was OK with the spearmint taste, plus it was good at removing stains and cleaning shoes.

Then one day in June, guards told her to turn in her SpringFresh because it was among more than a dozen brands of Chinese-made toothpaste found to contain a poisonous chemical used in antifreeze.

Georgia officials had stocked SpringFresh in 39 prisons and dozens of other state facilities. One tube was found to contain one of the highest concentrations of the poison in any toothpaste shipped to the U.S., according to the Food and Drug Administration.

“I was blown away,” said Painter, a 31-year-old convicted carjacker at Atlanta’s Metro State Prison.

At the request of The Associated Press, a New Jersey company traced the shipping of the SpringFresh toothpaste, demonstrating how it followed an unchecked route from a Chinese factory to Painter’s prison cell. Federal regulators did not look for the poison until they saw news reports about it being found in toothpaste in Panama, the Dominican Republic and Australia.

The manufacturer substituted toxic diethylene glycol — or DEG — for a more expensive sweetener. The Chinese government did not see it as a hazard and let it pass through customs.

Experts say it’s unlikely that anyone — even a child — could ingest enough tainted toothpaste to become seriously ill. But the disagreement between Chinese and U.S. officials about the chemical reflects many of the issues in the U.S.-China import crisis.

Chinese goods now account for 60 percent of all consumer-product recalls in the United States. Safety scares such as the one involving toothpaste have become an all-too-common problem, said Donald Mays, a product-safety expert for Consumers Union.

“It is indicative of a major concern we have about unscrupulous business practices in China,” Mays said.

Starting point
The SpringFresh toothpaste was made in a manufacturing plant in the eastern city of Suzhou, China, a tourist spot famed for its gardens. The nondescript two-story facility is an industrial area about a 30-minute drive from the heart of town, tucked in a maze of factories.

Some 90 people live and work in the plant, operated by the Suzhou Qingxin Daily Chemical Co. Ltd. The company has been making SpringFresh for at least five years, the manager said.

Under U.S. standards, America-made toothpaste is customarily made with glycerin, a sweetener that holds together other ingredients. But the Suzhou plant substituted DEG, which also is used in industrial solvents.

U.S. scientists discovered the chemical’s dangers in 1937, when at least 105 people died after taking a medicine made in Tennessee that contained DEG. It has periodically resurfaced as a deadly additive, including last year in Panama, when DEG-tainted cough syrup and other medicines triggered the deaths of at least 90 people.

It’s not clear where Suzhou Qingxin Daily Chemical got the DEG. After speaking to The Associated Press once, the company’s general manager, Liu Changqing, could not be reached about that question.

In China, DEG is traditionally cheaper than glycerin, and there was no government prohibition against using it.

The FDA allows only trace amounts of DEG in toothpaste. But Chinese officials maintain that toothpaste containing less than 15.6 percent DEG, by weight, is harmless.

“This may be just a case of different standards and opinions,” Liu said.

The Chinese government does not check DEG levels in products like toothpaste, said Mengshi Lin, a University of Missouri food scientist who in the late 1990s was a Chinese government export inspector.

Chinese inspections instead focus on human food, he said.

Under fire
China’s food inspections have come under fire, too. U.S. inspectors this year banned or recalled a number of Chinese food exports, including drug-laced frozen eel and juice made with unsafe color additives.

Global customers’ concerns gradually seem to be pushing Chinese officials to make changes, experts said. On July 11, Beijing banned DEG from toothpaste.

Meanwhile, large U.S. retailers have been placing inspectors in Chinese factories to watch for safety or quality problems, Mays said.

Dollar stores and smaller retailers that received much of the DEG-tainted toothpaste generally cannot afford to place inspectors overseas, he added.

Since Sept. 11, the U.S. Department of Customs and Border Protection has placed inspectors at ports in 19 countries. But the agency has no one in China because officials do not have a necessary agreement with the Chinese government.

Even if customs inspectors were in China, their focus would be explosives and weapons of mass destruction — not toiletries. The FDA is responsible for toothpaste, and has no inspectors permanently stationed in China.

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