Black and White Cat

Richard Spencer wonders how the British media would deal with the death of a politician of Huang Ju’s stature - some obituaries would be "lengthy and elegant" while other coverage would be "not very dignified".

Not so in China. Here, the dignified approach is a short statement reassuring us that Huang Ju was not being investigated for corruption.

So the undignified road is left to blogs. Cam speculates that he may have died from the toothpaste.

I have my own theory, but since it is almost certainly wrong and could be construed as inflammatory, I won’t repeat it. Though I will ask… if a guy told you his name was Chrysanthemum, what would your first thought be? But wild, inaccurate and possibly illegal rumour-mongering aside, the cause of a Chinese leader’s death is never disclosed.

The inner secrets of the politburo are like the Tao:

"If one man asks another ‘What is the Tao’, and the other tells him, neither of them know".  (Zhuang Zi)
   
So what about the toothpaste? Will the industrial solvent diethylene glycol (DEG) kill us, as it did Panamanian cough syrup drinkers? I’ve been wondering about this, so I just wasted a largish tube of Colgate (140g) to find out how many cleanings you get to a tube. The answer I came up with was 133. Yes, I have way too much spare time. According to CCTV (I haven’t checked if CCTV is right about this) EU food standards say it is safe to consume up to 0.5 mg per kg of body weight. And, yes, I know that’s not what the CCTV-9 piece actually says, but it was mistranslated from CCTV-4’s report.

For a 70 kg adult (154lb) 0.5mg per kg of body weight would translate to 35 mg per day.

How much diethylene glycol is in the allegedly dodgy toothpaste? The US authorities say they found a concentration of 4%. So that 140g tube would contain 5.6g of industrial solvent. Divided by 133, that would give you 42 mg of DEG - 84 times the EU safety limit. But you clean your teeth twice a day so that means it’s 166 times… if you eat the stuff. But of course you don’t. You spit it out and wash your mouth out, leaving nothing but a tiny trace. So if you weigh about 70 kg and use toothpaste in a normal way, I think it’s fair to say the Chinese stuff is safe.

After all, who swallows toothpaste?

Young children, maybe.

How heavy is a three-year-old child? I haven’t got a three-year-old child handy, so I’m relying on this website to tell me how much one of them should weigh. It tells me 14.35 kg. If that’s true, it takes 4.87 three-year-olds to balance one 70 kg adult. If this imaginary child eats the toothpaste he/she will be getting 166 times 4.87 times the EU limit. How much is that? 808 times too much.

Suddenly I don’t feel quite so confident about this safety business.

It would be an understatement to say that my back of the envelope calculations do not count as a scientific and reliable study. The toothpaste probably doesn’t do you any real harm.

But I have to say I don’t have much sympathy for the official position right now. It’s just a little bit galling to hear China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine criticizing the US FDA after that same Chinese government department launched a totally spurious attack on the Japanese-produced SKII cosmetics line for purely political reasons. SKII, if you recall, contained trace levels of chromium… as does just about everything we eat, drink and breathe. Were the Japanese supposed to spend vast amounts of money pointlessly removing something that you even find in organic vegetables?

Why do I say the SKII affair was a political stunt? The fake media frenzy was called off the day before Shinzo Abe took over from Public Enemy Number One: Junichiro Koizumi.

So, now, the phrase "taste of your own cough medicine" springs to mind.