From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Med...6

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Fortune Way translated the certificate into English, putting its name — not the Taixing Glycerine Factory’s — at the top of the document, before shipping the barrels to a second trading company, this one in Barcelona.
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Li Can, managing director at Fortune Way, said he did not remember the transaction and could not comment, adding, “There is a high volume of trade.”
Upon receiving the barrels in September 2003, the Spanish company, Rasfer International, did not test the contents, either. It copied the chemical analysis provided by Fortune Way, then put its logo on it. Ascensión Criado, Rasfer’s manager, said in an e-mail response to written questions that when Fortune Way shipped the syrup, it did not say who made it.
Several weeks later, Rasfer shipped the drums to a Panamanian broker, the Medicom Business Group. “Medicom never asked us for the name of the manufacturer,” Ms. Criado said.
A lawyer for Medicom, Valentín Jaén, said his client was a victim, too. “They were tricked by somebody,” Mr. Jaén said. “They operated in good faith.”
In Panama, the barrels sat unused for more than two years, and officials said Medicom improperly changed the expiration date on the syrup.
During that time, the company never tested the product. And the Panamanian government, which bought the 46 barrels and used them to make cold medicine, also failed to detect the poison, officials said.
The toxic pipeline ultimately emptied into the bloodstream of people like Ernesto Osorio, a former high school teacher in Panama City. He spent two months in the hospital after ingesting poison cough syrup last September.
Just before Christmas, after a kidney dialysis treatment, Mr. Osorio stood outside the city’s big public hospital in a tear-splattered shirt, describing what his life had become.
“I’m not an eighth of what I used to be,” Mr. Osorio said, his partly paralyzed face hanging like a slab of meat. “I have trouble walking. Look at my face, look at my tears.” The tears, he said apologetically, were not from emotion, but from nerve damage.
And yet, Mr. Osorio knows he is one of the lucky victims.
“They didn’t know how to keep the killer out of the medicine,” he said simply.
While the suffering in Panama was great, the potential profit — at least for the Spanish trading company, Rasfer — was surprisingly small. For the 46 barrels of glycerin, Rasfer paid Fortune Way $9,900, then sold them to Medicom for $11,322, according to records.
Chinese authorities have not disclosed how much Fortune Way and the Taixing Glycerine Factory made on their end, or how much they knew about what was in the barrels.
“The fault has to be traced back to areas of production,” said Dr. Motta, the cardiologist in Panama who helped uncover the source of the epidemic. “This was my plea — please, this thing is happening to us, make sure whoever did this down the line is not doing it to Peru or Sierra Leone or some other place.”
A Counterfeiter’s Confession
The power to prosecute the counterfeiters is now in the hands of the Chinese.
Last spring, the government moved quickly against Mr. Wang, the former tailor who poisoned Chinese residents.
The authorities caught up with him at a roadblock in Taizhou, a city just north of Taixing, in chemical country. He was weak and sick, and he had not eaten in two days. Inside his white sedan was a bankbook and cash. He had fled without his wife and teenage son.
Chinese patients were dead, a political scandal was brewing and the authorities wanted answers. Mr. Wang was taken to a hospital. Then, in long sessions with investigators, he gave them what they wanted, explaining his scheme, how he tested industrial syrup by drinking it, how he decided to use diethylene glycol and how he conned pharmaceutical companies into buying his syrup, according to a government official who was present for his interrogation.
“He made a fortune, but none of it went to his family,” said Wang Xiaodong, a former village official who knows Mr. Wang and his siblings. “He liked to gamble.”