Better to get cavities than to brush your teeth with this paste!

WARNING: Increased global trade, may actually become dangerous to our health!

It's apparently a dangerous world out there among the shelves of your local discount stores, where the cheaper prices may bring you more trouble than you bargained for.

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The latest concern is counterfeit toothpaste with the Colgate brand name, which has started to pop up across Southern Ontario bargain stores. The toothpaste which only has English labeling is said to have been manufactured in South Africa and is reported to contain an ingredient used in antifreeze and brake line fluids. The fake toothpaste was first discovered in American stores last week, as a number of consumers reported ill effects from their daily regimen of brushing their teeth. While the FDA says that the chemical poses “a low health risk”, it still is a rather uncomfortable shock to belief in product integrity.

It’s become a big problem for Colgate which obviously is not thrilled with the unwanted attention to its brand from the counterfeit product. They have gone to pains to explain that they do not import their products from South Africa and have set up a toll free line for reports of any other discoveries of the counterfeit tooth paste.

The counterfeit problem is just one of the many issues popping up as North American becomes more reliant on world suppliers for their consumer products and trade expands to those countries which may not have as many stringent health regulations as there are here.

The Globe and Mail featured the story on its website with an article tracking some of the higher profile cases of dangerous goods slipping into the country in the most innocent of packaging.

Consumers need to be a tad more attentive to packaging and presentation, making sure that they know the origin of their products and if things don’t look right, it might be wise to leave that bargain priced item sitting on the shelf. Never has it seemed, that the slogan “let the buyer beware" been more relevant...”

Tainted toothpaste sparks probe
JOANNA SMITH
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
June 19, 2007 at 2:04 AM EDT

Health Canada is investigating suspected counterfeit toothpaste found in Southern Ontario that is similar to a product at the centre of a health recall throughout the United States because of fears it contains an ingredient used in antifreeze.

Steve Janke, 40, bought a tube of what purports to be Colgate brand toothpaste labelled as being manufactured in South Africa from a dollar store in Guelph, Ont.

The packaging was missing the French translation found on most Canadian products and the 100-millilitre tube was labelled as being manufactured by Colgate-Palmolive (PTY) Ltd. in South Africa.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a nationwide alert last week after finding similarly labelled tubes in four states. Some contained the chemical diethylene glycol (DEG), a cheap glycerin substitute found in antifreeze and brake fluid.

Colgate-Palmolive, which had no comment Monday, has told U.S. authorities it does not sell the 100-ml tubes in the United States and it does not import toothpaste from South Africa.

The FDA said the chemical poses “a low health risk” but a Staten Island newspaper in New York reported two people were hospitalized for nausea and abdominal pain after brushing their teeth with the phony Colgate.

Health Canada is taking the discovery seriously.

Wahid Choksi, who owns a chain of discount stores called Everything for a Dollar Store, said he has taken the inventory off the shelves.

“I called all my stores and I told them to remove it from the shelves as soon as possible and they have removed it,” Mr. Choksi said Monday. It was unclear last night how many tubes had been sold by Mr. Choksi.

He said he also alerted his supplier, Toronto-based FHT Enterprises Inc. He had ordered the toothpaste from the company on March 26 and was shown a sample with a Canadian label, he said.

Athar Tayyabi, of FHT, said he was also shown a Canadian sample before importing 1,440 tubes from a company in New York. He said Mr. Choksi's chain was the only client he had sold them to.

“I'm going to throw it in the garbage,” he said of the remaining inventory. Mr. Tayyabi would not disclose the name of his American supplier.

Health Canada began watching out for toothpaste brands imported from China last month when the FDA started testing for DEG after reports of tainted Chinese shipments surfaced in Central America and the Caribbean.

There have been no reported deaths from that toothpaste, but around 100 people died in Panama last year after ingesting DEG-contaminated cough syrup. It is unknown where the phony Colgate was manufactured but the suspicions about Chinese manufactured goods deepened Monday when it emerged that every one of the 24 toys recalled for safety reasons in the United States so far this year, including the enormously popular Thomas and Friends wooden train sets, was manufactured in China.

It is a record that is increasingly causing alarm among consumer advocates, parents and regulators. The latest recall, announced last week, involves 1.5 million Thomas and Friends trains and rail sets – or about 4 per cent of all those sold in the United States over the past two years – which were coated at a factory in China with potentially poisonous lead paint. Just in the last month, a so-called Floating Eyeballs toy made in China was recalled after it was found to be filled with kerosene, sets of toy drums and a toy bear were also recalled because of lead paint and an infant wrist rattle was recalled because of a choking hazard.

A spokesman for Health Canada, Paul Duchesne, said the agency would investigate the potential counterfeit toothpaste and will take “appropriate compliance and enforcement action,” if necessary.

Mr. Janke, of Cambridge, Ont., said he was surprised to find the mysteriously labelled packages inside the first dollar store he checked out after reading about the U.S. scare.
“The actual main packaging looks fine,” Mr. Janke said. “It's when you get to the small print that it starts to fall apart.”

The cardboard box was riddled with spelling errors, often mistaking the letter ‘L' for ‘I' and vice versa, so that “should” became “shouid” and “against” became “agalnst”. The brand name was misspelled as “Coigate.”

The same information printed on the tube inside contained no errors, Mr. Janke said. He called the hot line Colgate-Palmolive had set up to handle the counterfeit crisis, and said he was told the tube he found in Guelph was not manufactured by the company and he was asked to send it in for testing.

With a report from The New York Times