Now toxic Chinese wallboard!!!

If it wasn’t bad enough that we had a public outcry and lawsuits about lead in Chinese-made toys and toxic chemical filler in Chinese manufactured baby formula, now we find out that the Chinese may even be screwing up our houses. From a story in USA Today comes this report.

Several home owners are blaming some drywall imported from China in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and Wilma as giving off a foul odor and causing a range of health problems, according to a lawsuit. Remember a few years back when carpeting was discovered to be gassing-off formaldehyde that caused severe allergic reactions?

Several class action lawsuits have been filed, including claims against U.S. homebuilder Lennar and a Chinese drywall manufacturer, Knauf Plasterboard Tianjin.

Lennar, which has been replacing drywall in some homes, says it didn’t approve the use of the imported drywall. Knauf says it wasn’t necessarily the manufacturer and that the drywall has passed tests that have indicated that it produces no health hazards. I suppose next we’ll read that several complainants say that they don’t really live in those houses either, but they do have a rash and figured the Chinese must be involved somehow.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission and Florida regulators are investigating. One estimate suggests 60,000 homes may contain the drywall. Attorneys who have filed the suits claim residents have suffered rashes, new allergies, asthma and sore throats. Attorneys are calling for monitoring of the alleged victims and of course for compensation, if for no one else, at least for the attorneys.

I certainly don’t know if there’s validity to these claims or not, but the truly sad thing is that there are really no effective protections for the American public against most of the issues that we’ve been seeing news about for the past few years. The agencies that were originally set up to test and inspect imports and protect us against imported health issues, like the Consumer Product Safety Commission, have been gutted or effectively neutralized over the years by budget cuts Administration policies during the last few administrations, in deference to “free market” pressures.

I guess they meant that you are now free to get sick and die using cheap free market products from countries that don’t have to abide by our laws or product safeguards. Of course, as our recent peanut scandal pointed out, we can’t even protect ourselves from our own countrymen, much less from a foreign supplier. Who knows, maybe Knauf Plasterboard made their drywall using U.S. peanut by-products as filler in the paper.