" From China to Panama, a Trail of Poisoned Medicine is a longer and more informative article from the New York times that appeared (in an extracted version)yesterday at MSNBC but appears to be no longer there. (I'd suggest looking soon at the NYT article, as they tend to remove stuff to a "for fee" archive after a week or so.)"
There have been numerous other reports of counterfeit food products, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals being exported from China. Some articles that appeared briefly and then seem to have "unhappened" lamented that food and medicinal adulteration, counterfeiting, false labeling, and other frauds are so prevalent within China, victimizing their own people, that it's considered "business as usual."
Both articles above cite numerous cases in which at least one Chinese counterfeiter substituted diethylene glycol for glycerine, labelling the product as 99.5% pure glycerine. The phony material was used in numerous pharmaceutical products, as yet not completely indentified. Since glycerine is a "universal ingredient" in a vast range of pharmaceuticals, several hundred deaths have been documented and specifically linked to the counterfeit product. Circumstantial evidence indicates that several thousand - and potentially severeal hundred thousand - "unexplained deaths" are due to this one counterfeit product.