Tainted

A city crime lab employee left his own DNA on the pistol police say was used to kill an off-duty Baltimore detective, indicating that a recently discovered problem with contamination at the lab may be more widespread than officials originally believed. Evidence from the murder trial of Brandon Grimes was not among the 12 instances city officials identified last week in which lab employees introduced their own DNA into crime evidence. But lab officials testified yesterday that there are thousands of partial strands of unknown DNA in evidence samples - like the one recovered from the pistol in the Grimes case - that must be checked by hand.

The trial of a man accused of killing an off-duty Baltimore police officer has been delayed until tomorrow morning so that his defense attorney can prepare to cross-examine the Police Department's DNA section chief about recent reports of evidence contamination. Yesterday, Judge Timothy Doory told prosecutor Kevin Wiggins to turn over a report by an outside forensics organization, conducted earlier this decade at the request of public defenders who were contesting gunshot residue evidence in another case.

Baltimore crime analysts have been contaminating evidence with their own DNA - a revelation that led to the dismissal this week of the city Police Department's crime lab director and prompted questions yesterday from defense attorneys and forensic experts about the professionalism of the state's biggest and busiest crime lab. Edgar Koch, who had been the city lab's director for the past decade, was fired Tuesday because of the DNA contamination and...

WASHINGTON - After warning Americans for six weeks against eating certain kinds of tomatoes, federal health officials gave the all-clear yesterday - without ever finding solid evidence that tomatoes were the cause of the largest outbreak of food-borne illness in at least a decade. In lifting the salmonella warning, the Food and Drug Administration met the demands of the tomato industry, which had been requesting the action. But the move is unlikely to stop tomato growers, packers and sellers from pushing for $100 million or more in federal aid to reimburse them for losses.

WASHINGTON - For the first time since a salmonella outbreak began in April, the government said yesterday that at least some of the illnesses appeared to be caused by jalapeno peppers, and it warned those at greatest risk against eating them. Federal health officials have been warning since early June against eating certain types of tomatoes, and they again refused to rule out the possibility that tomatoes may be responsible for the largest foodborne outbreak in at least a decade. Tomato growers have complained for weeks that tomatoes are not the cause, and some state health officials suspect tomatoes aren't responsible because they have a limited shelf life and the number of illnesses keeps rising despite the nationwide warning.

Not long ago, the global crisis in tainted and counterfeit drugs hit home for me. My cousin Laura - high-octane teacher, wife and mom - was rushed to her local emergency room. Six weeks earlier, she had had surgery for a broken tibia and fibula. Now a vein in her leg had clotted, and she needed immediate, high-dose anticoagulation. Physically and psychologically, Laura's first hospital stay had been bad enough. Unfortunately, after the surgery, no one had told her to stop taking her birth control pills because of the risk of clotting.

WASHINGTON -- The government needs $225 million and a range of new powers to protect Americans from unsafe drug imports, federal health officials said yesterday under tough questioning by lawmakers investigating a contaminated blood thinner from China. "We currently have a crisis and an opportunity to make real change," Deborah M. Autor, director of the Food and Drug Administration's drug compliance office, said at a House oversight subcommittee hearing. Autor joined Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA's drug division, in asking Congress to give the agency the power to inspect foreign companies that ship drugs to the U.S., stop imports at the border if they come from factories not inspected and require American drug makers to police their overseas suppliers.

WASHINGTON --A contaminated blood thinner from China suspected in dozens of U.S. deaths has now become a worldwide public health problem, with 10 other countries detecting the often-toxic ingredient, federal investigators said yesterday. The compound, which in tests mimics the real blood thinner heparin but costs less to make, may have been added deliberately somewhere along a production chain that began on farms in China, beyond the reach of U.S. regulators. Food and Drug Administration officials also announced a major scientific breakthrough in their attempt to understand how patients got sick from the contaminated heparin.

WASHINGTON -- Investigators have moved closer to understanding how a widely used blood thinner killed as many as 19 Americans, identifying the chemical that tainted the Heparin products. Meanwhile, the American companies that made Heparin and its main ingredient blamed suppliers from China for the contamination. The Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that the chemical was a kind of souped-up version of a compound commonly used to treat arthritic joints. The chemical - over-sulfated chondroitin sulfate - is not approved for use in prescription drugs sold in the United States, and it doesn't normally figure in the production of Heparin, FDA officials said.

A Las Vegas food import company, two Chinese businesses and the companies' top executives were indicted yesterday by a federal grand jury for their parts in a tainted pet food scandal last year that sickened or killed thousands of dogs and cats, the Justice Department said. The announcement by John F. Wood, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, marks the first time a domestic company has faced criminal charges because melamine - a chemical found in plastics that can cause kidney failure in animals - was added to shipments of wheat gluten, a binding agent used in pet foods.