China executes ex-official over fake drugs

BEIJING — China executed Zheng Xiaoyu, a former director of its food and drug agency, Tuesday for approving fake medicine in exchange for cash, illustrating how serious Beijing is about tackling product safety, while officials announced steps to safeguard food at next summer's Olympic Games.

The measures include ensuring athletes' food is free of substances that could trigger a positive result in tests for banned performance-enhancing drugs. Many of China's recent food woes have been tied to the purity of ingredients, flavoring, artificial colors and other additives.

During Zheng's tenure as head of the State Food and Drug Administration from 1997 to 2006, the agency approved six untested drugs that turned out to be fake, and some drug-makers used falsified documents to apply for approvals, according to state media reports. One antibiotic caused the deaths of at least 10 people.

"The few corrupt officials of the SFDA are the shame of the whole system and their scandals have revealed some very serious problems," agency spokeswoman Yan Jiangying said at a news conference Tuesday, highlighting efforts to improve China's track record on food and drug safety.

Next year's Beijing Olympics, a great source of pride for China, also has been targeted in the crackdown on unsafe food. Sun Wenxu, an official with the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, told reporters that athletes, coaches, officials and others can be assured of safe meals.

"All the procedures involving Olympic food, including production, processing, packaging, storing and transporting will be closely monitored," Sun said.

Food and drug agency spokeswoman Yan acknowledged the agency's supervision remains unsatisfactory and that it has been slow to tackle the problem.

"China is a developing country, and our supervision of food and drugs started quite late, and our foundation for this work is weak, so we are not optimistic about the current food and drug safety situation," she said.

Fears abroad over Chinese-made drugs were sparked last year by the deaths of dozens of people in Panama who took medicine contaminated with diethylene glycol — a thickening agent used in antifreeze — imported from China. It was passed off as harmless glycerin.

In El Salvador, officials said Tuesday they have found a harmful substance in a shipment of 360 toothpaste tubes from China that were seized and held at the customs office. Gustavo Villatoro, El Salvador's customs director, said officials found large quantities of diethylene glycol in two different brands of toothpaste.