Chinese Drug Regulator Sentenced to Die

May 29, 08:22 AM

Current Headlines: A court in Shanghai on Tuesday sentenced China's former top food and drug regulator to death for accepting bribes of $800,000.

Prosecutors said Zheng Xiaoyu took the bribes between 1998 and 2005, when he served as chief of the Food and Drug Administration, in exchange for approving drug production licenses, the Xinhua news agency reported.

Zheng and two other former officials were detained in February. The other two cases are still before the court.

As a result, the government ordered a review of more than 170,000 production licenses issued by Zheng's agency in the past 10 years, a New York Times correspondent reported.

In the past two years, more than 200 people in Panama died from using cough syrup from China that contained a chemical used in anti-freeze. The report said tens of thousands of people are sickened or killed in China very year because of counterfeiting and phony food and drugs.

Most recently, the largest pet food recall in North American history was triggered when imported glutens from China were found to contain chemicals used to make plastic.