In China, some of the most unthinkable products have found their way on the market, such as second-hand clothes collected from the morgue, tainted vaccines, and poisoned milk powder. Now add fake “false teeth” to this notorious laundry list.
“We use scrap steel,” a worker at Cidu Zhongcheng Medical Supply Company, a denture maker in Beijing, told an undercover journalist from a China Central Television investigative documentary program that aired on March 15. Another employee at the same company later admitted that adding scrap steel would reduce the cost of production.
Dentures are manufactured with special, clinically approved alloys. Scrap metal and steel are hazardous to health because they often contain toxic heavy metals.
According to the CCTV program, the scrap steel used by Cidu Zhongcheng came in “Vera PDS” packaging and without any markings in Chinese. “Vera PDS” is a denture metal alloy product sold by Aala Dent, a California-based company that manufactures nickel-chromium alloy for use in dental products. CCTV didn’t explain how it was that scrap steel ended up in “Vera PDS” packaging.
The dentures company had obtained the scrap steel from a middleman, Mr. Hou from the city of Foshan in Guangdong Province. When interviewed by CCTV, Mr. Hou claimed that 90 percent of his scrap steel supply came from Tianjin, and added that he had never met the boss of the company that he had been working for over the past 7 or 8 years.
