Health officials order drug recall

The Shanghai Food and Drug Administration has pulled every capsule of 11 varieties of medicine suspected of containing toxic heavy metals from store shelves in the city, an administration official told the Global Times Monday.

"Currently, there are no toxic capsules in circulation," said Du Bing, press officer for the city's food and drug administration.

Du said that capsules containing the heavy metal chromium had been found in Shanghai and authorities were continuing their investigation.

The toxic capsules came to light Sunday, after the investigative news program Weekly Quality Report aired an expose on China Central Television (CCTV) about how several underground factories in northern China's Hebei Province sold industrial gelatin contaminated with heavy metals, including lead and chromium, to medical capsule manufacturers in neighboring Zhejiang Province.

The non-industrial, edible form of gelatin is a raw material in the production of easy-to-swallow capsules that pharmaceutical companies use to encase many kinds of medicine.

In this case, however, the factories extracted the gelatin from leather scraps containing the toxic metals, according to the report. The capsule manufacturers then passed the material off as edible gelatin, which they processed into capsules and sold to several pharmaceutical makers.

The expose identified 13 brands of medicine that contained as much as 90 times the amount of chromium allowed under current safety regulations, according to the report. The 13 brands included drugs made by well-known companies such as Tonghua Golden-Horse Pharmaceutical Industry and Jilin Xiuzheng Pharmaceutical Group Ltd.

After the news broke, the Shanghai Food and Drug Administration launched an emergency plan to find any contaminated capsules in the city, Du said. It found 11 of the 13 kinds of medicine suspected of containing the contaminated capsules in the city's real-time pharmaceutical distribution monitoring system and ordered stores to remove them.

"We have asked all pharmacies to check and correct the problem themselves," Du said.

Xiong Wei, general manager of Shanghai LBX Pharmacy, which has 25 stores in the city, confirmed that the company had received the authorities' request, but had not found any of the suspected drugs.

Other large pharmacy chains said they did not sell these brands. "We don't purchase these kinds of medicines made in northern or western China, said the head of the Quality Inspection Department of Yifeng Pharmacy, which has about 80 drug stores in Shanghai.

The local authority said they are now closely monitoring the medicine circulation, and will soon launch a massive campaign to inspect Shanghai's capsule manufacturers.