China executes ex-head of food and drug agency

Updated: 10:00 p.m. PT July 9, 2007

BEIJING - China on Tuesday executed the former head of its food and drug watchdog who had become a symbol of the country’s wide-ranging problems on product safety.

Zheng was sentenced to death in May for taking bribes to approve an antibiotic blamed for at least 10 deaths and other substandard medicines. Cao was given a death sentence last month with a two-year reprieve for accepting bribes and dereliction of duty.

Chinese officials already have said the country faces social unrest and a further tarnished image abroad unless it improves the quality and safety of its food and medicine.

It makes you wonder how many FDA officials in the US, would have been executed under China law for allowing all that aids tainted blood to be sold.

The IG Farben and Bayer companies were never punished for the aids tainted blood incident, nor for financing Auschwitz's and Josef Mengele or for delivering the poison Cyclone B from Uerdingen.

In the early 1940's, the IG Farben Chemical Company employed a Polish salesman who sold cyanide to the Nazis for use in Auschwitz. The same salesman also worked as a chemist in the manufacture of the poison gas.

This same cyanide gas along with Zyklon B and malathion was used to exterminate millions of Jews and other groups.

After the war the salesman, fearing for his life, joined the Catholic Church and was ordained a priest in 1946. The salesman became Poland's youngest bishop in 1958, Pope John Paul ll is referred to as a saint.