Baxter held its annual meeting yesterday in Chicago. According to press reports:

Although the hourlong meeting focused on Baxter's record sales last year and rising share price, about 15 minutes was devoted to the heparin imbroglio. One investor wondered whether Baxter has taken steps to "close the loopholes" in its supply chain to make sure such a situation did not happen again.

Parkinson acknowledged "challenges associated with managing the supply chain," but that Baxter and other companies were making changes for the better.

Parkinson said Baxter and other companies get heparin's raw ingredient from China because "that's where the pig population is," adding that the Chinese supply of hogs is five times larger than in the U.S.

Well it wasn't the Chinese pigs that added oversulphated chondroitin sulphate (OSCS) to their intestines. It was someone looking to substitue a counterfeit product that was 100 times cheaper than Chinese raw heparan made from pig intestines. Someplace between the workshop that received the raw intestines and the bottling of the finished heparin, someone substituted counterfeit OSCS.

We have obtained a translated copy of a Chinese patent for the manufacture of OSCS. The Chinese patent was filed December 20, 2005 by Shandong University in Shandong China. This patent claims that OSCS can be cheaply manufactured using the claimed technique and the resulting OSCS product "has anticoagulant activity of 10 IU/mg," "anti-inflammatory and pain killing activity," and "inhibits tumor growth and metastasis."

It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to figure out that this or a similar product might be used as a substitute for heparin, particularly when disease in China had caused a sharp increase in the price of the raw product.

I commend the responsible Baxter shareholders who are challenging their company to act responsibly and "close the loopholes" that let this counterfeit product into the Baxter products.

All manufacturers of food and drug products owe a non-delegable duty to the consumers to insure the safety of their products, even if this means they have to use only those raw materials that can be securely monitored.

Labels: annual meeting, Baxter, Heparin, heparin attorney, Heparin Class Action, heparin lawsuit, heparin lawyer, MDL, MDL; Multi-District Litigation, OSCS, over sulfated chondroitin sulfate, SPL