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FDA opens its first office outside US in Chinese capital

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) opened an office yesterday in China’s capital — its first outside the US — as part of a new global strategy to ensure the safety of trillions of dollars of imports.

Product safety has become a key issue as American manufacturers shift operations overseas and foreign producers make inroads in the US.

Worries about the quality of Chinese exports to the US have become a major feature of bilateral trade ties, with substandard Chinese food and toxin-laced toothpaste among product safety scares this past year.

“In the past we have always been at our borders to try and catch things that were not safe or did not meet our standards,” US Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony to mark the opening of the Beijing office. “In the future our new strategy is to build safety into products at every step of the way.”

After meetings with Chinese officials on Tuesday, Leavitt said both countries would work on a joint initiative to use better technology for detecting contamination, demand greater corporate responsibility and increase sharing of data and information.

In the past year, China has stepped up inspections and tightened restrictions on food production and other industries, after a series of global product scandals. Still, it’s an uphill climb for Chinese authorities to regulate countless small and illegally run operations, which are often blamed for introducing chemicals and food additives into the murky food chain.

Most recently, dairy products tainted with the industrial chemical melamine have been blamed in the deaths of at least three babies in China. Tens of thousands of other children were sickened.

Shao Mingli, a vice health minister and head of the country’s food and drug administration, said the opening of the FDA office “provides a very clear signal to the whole world.”

“As food and drug regulatory agencies, our first priority is to protect public health and life,” Shao said at the ceremony. “This is our top responsibility.”

The FDA office in Beijing will be followed by two more in the Chinese cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou. Offices will also be opened in India, Latin America and Europe in coming months as the FDA tries to globalize its presence to reassure consumers. This year alone, the US imported US$2 trillion in goods, equal to four times the size of Brazil’s economy.

Over the past year, the FDA has been criticized for failing to prevent a string of problematic products in the US, including contaminated blood thinners manufactured in China and salmonella-tainted peppers imported from Mexico.

“FDA is reaching beyond our own borders to be able to work collaboratively and cooperatively with other regulatory agencies around the world” as a way to assure that products are safe and effective, said the agency’s commissioner, Andrew von Eschenbach.
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