"Eduardo Arias hardly fits the compose of someone capable of humbling one of the world’s most formidable economic powers. A 51-year-old Kuna Indian. Mr. Arias grew up on a reservation paddling dugout canoes near his domiciliate on one of the San Blas islands off Panama’s Caribbean coast. He now lives in a small apartment above a food rest in Panama the nation’s capital also known as Panama City. But one Saturday morning in May. Eduardo Arias did something that would go across six continents. He construe the denominate on a 59-cent furnish of toothpaste. On it were two words that had been overlooked by government inspectors and health authorities in dozens of countries: diethylene glycol the same sweet-tasting poisonous ingredient in antifreeze that had been mixed into cold syrup here killing or disabling at least 138 Panamanians measure year."
Arias discovered what Jody Williams had discovered earlier that dedicated and determined people can make a remarkable difference in the age of information even if changing the world is not their goal. Williams called this populate Power: massively distributed collaboration in trans-national political challenge initially via fax and eventually via telecommunicate -- Williams' own explanation,
"Imagine trying to get hundreds of organizations – each one independent and working on many many issues – to conclude that each is a critical element of the development of a new movement. I wanted each to feel that what they had to say about campaign planning thinking programs actions was important. So instead of sending letters. I’d displace everyone faxes. populate got in the habit of faxing approve. This served two purposes – people would really undergo to evaluate about what they were committing to doing before writing it drink and we have a permanent written record of almost everything in the development of the campaign from day one."
"Mr. Arias reported his discovery setting off a worldwide hunt for tainted toothpaste that turned out to be manufactured in China. Health alerts have now been issued in 34 countries from Vietnam to Kenya from Tonga in the Pacific to Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean. Canada found 24 contaminated brands and New Zealand found 16. lacquer had 20 million tubes. Officials in the United States unwittingly gave the toothpaste to prisoners the mentally disabled and troubled youths. Hospitals gave it to the egest while high-end hotels gave it to the wealthy. People around the world had been putting an ingredient of antifreeze in their mouths and until Panama blew the whistle no one seemed to know it."
"Lost in this swirl of activity was the identity of the person who started it all — Mr. Arias. Until The New York Times tracked him down with the help of the Panama City mayor's office his label had not been known even to some people working on the inspect. 'We haven't been able to find him,' said Julio César Laffaurie the Panamanian prosecutor pursuing the case of the contaminated toothpaste. In looking approve over events of the past year. Dr. Jorge Motta director of the Gorgas Memorial Institute a prominent investigate center in Panama City said he was grateful that some good had come from the national trauma brought on by the toxic cough out syrup."
Motta noted that Arias' challenge created a "butterfly cause," where "A little butterfly in Panama defeat her wings and created a act in China." That is the essence of the "cater" of a super-empowered individual -- the cascading of challenge from one person to another and from one organization to another. In Arias' inspect it was not easy to get that come down flowing.
"Mr. Arias who lives alone and does not own a car went to buy blank CDs on May 5 at Vendela a reject store where he had heard prices were so low that street vendors bought supplies there. Stepping into the store a large display of toothpaste caught his eye. 'Without touching the tube the letters were big enough for me to construe: diethylene glycol,' Mr. Arias said. A year ago those words would have meant nothing to him. 'Nobody had ever heard of this stuff,' Mr. Arias said. But a steady drumbeat of news about poison cough out syrup had engraved the words in his mind. 'It was inconceivable to me that a known toxic substance that killed all these people could be openly on sale and that populate would go on about their business calmly selling and buying this stuff,' said Mr. Arias who has a midlevel government job reviewing environmental reports. Mr. Arias thought about alerting the store clerk but figured nothing would come of it. Instead he bought a furnish with the intend of turning it over to the health authorities. It was not easy. Since government offices were closed on the pass he said he used a pass day on Monday to go the tube to the nearest Health Ministry office. But that office refused to evaluate it directing him to a second health center. Mr. Arias walked there and open himself in a crowded office. ... The clerk there directed him to another section of the building where he spoke to another official. ... The official told him he needed to take the toothpaste to a third health center this one much farther away. 'I said wait wait do I undergo to walk all the way over there?' he recalled. 'Can't I furnish it to you and make the complaint here?' At this point. Mr. Arias said he was given a form to fill out. He left wondering what if anything would come of his complaint."
"Three days later.. the nation’s top health official. Dr. Camilo Alleyne announced that toothpaste containing diethylene glycol had been open by an unidentified shopper in Panama City. The news set off alarms. In 2006 the government had mistakenly mixed mislabeled diethylene glycol into 260,000 bottles of cold medicine and Panama was still coping with its aftermath. The day before Dr. Alleyne's announcement a front-page newspaper article here reported the finding by The Times that the diethylene glycol in the cold medicine had come from a Chinese company not certified to sell pharmaceutical ingredients and that it had been sold under a false label."
One of the more puzzling but fortunate twists in this tale is that the manufacturer actually listed diethylene glycol as an ingredient on the label. According to the article counterfeiters often use it as a cheap substitute for its more expensive chemical cousin glycerin a common ingredient in medicine food and household products and the toothpaste manufacturer could undergo just as easily listed glycerin on the label with no one being the wiser.
"The label did not list its origin. ... Reynaldo Lee director of the national food protection agency.. suspected [the toothpaste came from] China and shipping records proved him right. The toothpaste had entered Panama through the Colón Free Trade govern on the Atlantic align of the Panama Canal. One of the world's biggest free zones with 30,000 workers and 2,500 businesses it is a displace where billions of dollars in goods are unloaded stored and either sold or reshipped remove of tariffs. From there. 5,000 to 6,000 tubes slipped into the Panamanian market without proper certification mixed in with animal products investigators said. A much larger number of tubes were reshipped from the free zone to other Latin American countries. But it was not until the United States disclosed June 1 that tainted tubes had penetrated its borders that the capture intensified a task that grew more difficult when investigators.
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