Chinese official says food safety crisis could trigger social unrest

China's food safety crisis has tarnished its reputation abroad and threatens to spur social unrest at home, where more health scares are expected, a top official was quoted Monday as saying.

The comments were made at a seminar held by the country's top food and drug safety watchdog, where officials were also warned to learn from the example set by their former boss, Zheng Xiaoyu, who was this year sentenced to death for taking bribes from drug companies.

"Food security problems have impeded Chinese agri-products and food many times in international trade, and damaged our national credibility and image," Sun Xianze, an official with the State Food and Drug Administration, was quoted as saying by the official China Daily newspaper on Monday.

Sun was separately quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency as saying that "mass food safety incidents will continue to occur frequently, with the rural food safety situation in particular causing us to not be optimistic."

He cited a laundry list of domestic food scares from the past year, including drug-tainted fish, banned Sudan dye used to color egg yolks red, and pork tainted with clenbuterol, a banned feed additive.

"Food safety accidents and individual cases will not only affect the healthy development of the industry but could also impact local economies and social stability," said Sun, who is director of the agency's food safety coordination department.

Fears abroad over Chinese made products were sparked last year by the deaths of dozens of people in Panama who took medicine contaminated with diethylene glycol imported from China. It was passed off as harmless glycerin. In North America, Chinese wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine was blamed for the deaths of dogs and cats.

Seminar attendees were told to "draw profound lessons" from the former SFDA director, Zheng Xiaoyu, who was sentenced to death in May for taking bribes to approve substandard medicines, including an antibiotic blamed for at least 10 deaths within China.

Qu Wanxiang, the administration's vice minister of supervision, said corruption like Zheng's "shook the government's regulatory foundation and damaged the government's image." His comments were posted Monday to the SFDA Web site.

"The impact is extremely bad and the consequences extremely serious," Qu said.

Under Zheng's 1998-2005 tenure, his agency approved six medicines that turned out to be fake, and the drug makers used falsified documents to apply for approvals, state media have reported.

His death sentence was unusually heavy even for China, believed to carry out more court-ordered executions than all other nations combined, and likely indicates the leadership's determination to confront the country's dire product safety record.

As recently as Friday, China sentenced another official, one of Zheng's former subordinates, to death for taking bribes.

Cao Wenzhuang, SFDA's pharmaceutical registration department director, was given the death sentence with a two-year reprieve for accepting bribes and dereliction of duty. Such suspended death sentences usually are commuted to life in prison if the convict is deemed to have reformed.

In a related development, authorities announced last week that they had withdrawn the production licenses of five drug makers over the last year and penalized 128 others.

The Shanghai-based manufacturer of a leukemia drug banned by China's drug watchdog for causing adverse reactions said Monday it was investigating the problem.

"We are responsible for the patients and we take this issue very seriously," said Yin Qinxie, spokesman for Shanghai Pharmaceutical (Group) Co., China's biggest drug maker.

China's pharmaceutical industry is lucrative but poorly regulated. Some companies try to cash in by substituting fake or substandard ingredients.

The SFDA said over the weekend it had suspended the sale of methotrexate made by Shanghai Hualian Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd.

The drug is widely used to treat leukemia and other cancers as well as autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.

Adverse reactions were reported among some patients in Guangxi autonomous region in southern China and in Shanghai, the food and drug watchdog said in a notice on its Web site.

Yin said the company received reports on July 6 that some patients who received doses of methotrexate made by its unit, Shanghai Hualian Pharmaceutical Co., had felt leg pains and experienced difficulty walking.

"Experts are discussing and investigating it," Yin said. "We started trying to figure out the problem as soon as we got the reports on bad reactions."