Badly washed, packaged, sold as new. US businessmen have unwittingly imported millions of used, single-use plastic gloves from Thailand. Many of them are likely to have ended up in hospitals or with food processors. As CNN reports, Two businessmen raised the alarm at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and US Customs in February and March 2021.
But this did not change anything for the time being. The company in question in Thailand, Paddy the Room, delivered a further 28 shipping containers with a total of 80 million gloves to the USA. It wasn’t until around five months later in August that the FDA sent a warning to employees in the ports that all shipments from Paddy the Room were to be confiscated.
Import regulations are suspended due to Corona
Tarek cherries from Miami is one of the affected importers. He first resold the gloves without checking them, he says. Then he suddenly got angry calls from his customers. He then personally checked the second delivery from Thailand. Some of the gloves were full of holes. “I could not believe my eyes. They were used gloves. Some were dirty, some had blood stains on them. Some had dates that were two years ago. ” Kirschen reimbursed the affected customers for the money.
According to the report, the fight against the illegal trade in medical gloves is made more difficult by the fact that import regulations for medical protective equipment are suspended due to the corona pandemic in the United States. The FDA says it cannot comment on individual cases, but has “taken a number of steps to track down and stop those selling unapproved products.”
The operator of the factory is hiding in Hong Kong
The Thai authorities took action for the first time last December. The police raided Paddy the Room’s “production facility” and arrested the owner of the warehouse. However, the Thai authorities were unable to harm the tenant – he lives in Hong Kong.
Investigators found numerous rubbish bags full of used plastic gloves in the warehouse. In the factory, workers from abroad washed their gloves, re-dyed them with food coloring and put them in counterfeit packs from legitimate manufacturers. According to the Thai authorities, the company simply moved to a new location after the raid. Apparently there are also numerous other factories in Thailand with the same business model: In the past ten months, the Thai authorities have carried out more than ten raids on such factory halls.
Nitrile gloves are “currently the most dangerous goods in the world,” says industry expert Douglas Stein, who has been importing medical protective equipment into the USA for decades. There is “an endless stream of dirty, used and inferior gloves reaching the United States.” Stein estimates that the scam will generate billions of dollars. The federal authorities had only now understood the “enormous extent”. (noo)