Ethylene Glycol poison in OTC med kills dozens of Haitian Children

Click on the link above for the second article in the NY Times regarding tainted glycerin exported from China to countries all over the world which over the past 10-15 years has resulted in many deaths (hundreds, perhaps thousands).

This series is frightening from the perspective of an emergency medicine physician. If this happened in my town would I be astute enough to pick up on it. Luckily the FDA has been applying some simple tests to pharmaceutical raw materials to test for dangerous ethylene glycol contamination. But for the international crowd or border crowd someone who walks in with a bottle of cough syrup purchased from outside the USA and signs of ethylene glycol toxicity then beware.