US health official looks for product safety deal

A senior official from the US Department of Health and Human Services has been sent to Beijing to broker agreements on improving the country's food and drug safety, the Wall Street Journal reported. Mike Leavitt, the US secretary of health and human services, said that his chief of staff's trip to China would be the first of a number of meetings between the US and China on safety issues in the coming months. Leavitt said he wants one deal on food and feed safety and another on drugs and medical devices to be reached by December. Following a series of incidents in which products wholly or partially made in China were found to be tainted, Leavitt said America's regulatory agencies were concerned about "insufficient infrastructure across the board in China to assure the safety, quality and effectiveness" of Chinese exports. Meglena Kuneva, the EU's product safety chief, has said that China may be denied access to European markets if manufacturing standards do not improve.