HTM-RenalNET-UK

[Chris Pearson]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1858870-1,00.html

It is jarring to see where a drug like heparin begins. Liu Jing, a cheerful 36-year-old, is stomping around in pig poop and mud in knee-high boots. He is a farmer in Jiangsu province, north of Shanghai, where providing the raw ingredients for heparin is a big business. Liu's farm produces a key source of heparin: pig intestines. (Heparin is derived from the mucous membranes in the intestines.) Nearly half the world's pigs are in China, so companies like SPL have set up shop. In SPL's case, it first began buying raw heparin in 1996, established its own production facility to make the API in 2000 and began selling to Baxter, among others, in 2004. More than half the heparin sold--for Baxter alone it was a $30 million business last year--is made from pig guts bought in China.

Farmers like Liu sell to small-scale companies--often family-run businesses--that process the intestines into crude heparin, which in turn becomes the key ingredient for the heparin that Baxter and other major drug firms sell worldwide. SPL's CEO, David Strunce, told Congress last spring that the raw material comes from "government-regulated slaughterhouses." But that regulation, farmers in Jiangsu told TIME, is haphazard at best. And if the slaughterhouses are haphazardly regulated, the small heparin-processing businesses--hundreds of them across the country--are virtually unregulated. "We haven't ever had the government come and inspect our operation," said a processor in Jiangsu whose given name is Chang and who didn't offer his family name.
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"There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper." John Ruskin