Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Sept 16, 2019 (I)

choi

(1) K Oanh Ha, Jinshan Hong and Andreo Calonzo with Siegfrid Alegado, Lulu Yilun Chen and Jun Luo, The Gambling Addiction That's Upset Beijing.
(opening: "It's 6:30 on a Monday morning in China, and the Guangdong Club online gambling platform is humming as a stream of wagers placed in Chinese yuan flows through the portal. The club, which lists its place of registration as Costa Rica, hosts operators offering hundreds of sessions for such popular games as baccarat and blackjack, lotteries, and sports betting -- many of them in Chinese [language]. A single baccarat table can draw betting volumes touching 75,000 yuan ($10,500) in a 30-second game.  This is gambling with digital twist, and it allows Chiese to bet without traveling to Macau or Las Vegas")

Note: summary underneath the title in print: Chinese bettors are fueling a $24 billion digital gaming boom in Asia. The Communist Party is hard pressed to stop it.

(2) Peter Elstrom and Lulu Yilun Chen with Philip Glamann, Reinventing Alibaba.

Note: summary underneath the title in print: Daniel Zhang 张勇 says he's determined to blow up his own business before rivals or the trade war can

(3) Anna Edney, Susan Berfield and Evelyn Yu, How Carcinogens and oth4er impurities end up in the drug supply. (first of three feature stories)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/f ... an-got-past-the-fda

Note:
(a) Also on the title page:
90% of the pharmaceuticals sold in the US are generics
80% of the active ingredients are produced overseas, where FDA inspections are declining

(b) "The chemical N-Nitrosodimethylamine [there is no need to capitalize N in nitroso-], or NDMA, is a yellow liquid that dissolves in water. It doesn't have an odor or much of a taste. It's known to cause cancer in animals and is classified as a probable carcinogen in humans—it's most toxic to the liver. * * * 2 grams can kill a person in days. * * * NDMA no longer has industrial uses—it was once added to rocket fuel—but it can form during industrial processes at tanneries and foundries as well as at pesticide, dye, and tire makers * * * It's in tobacco smoke, which is one reason secondhand smoke is dangerous, and it's what makes eating a lot of cured and grilled meat potentially risky. * * * In July 2018 the FDA announced that NDMA had been found in the widely used blood-pressure medicine valsartan and started overseeing a recall of drugs from three companies. They'd all bought the active ingredient for their valsartan from Zhejiang Huahai Pharmaceutical Co[, Ltd 浙江华海药业股份有限公司 (since 2001); 1989-2001 as 临海市汛桥合成化工厂’ needless to say, many lawsuits have been filed in US], one of China's biggest generic companies. The recall has since been expanded 51 times, to include two related drugs, irbesartan and losartan, made by at least 10 companies—some since 2014. Drugs sold to millions of people in 30 countries could be tainted.   Some of the contaminated valsartan contains as much as 17 micrograms of NDMA in a single pill. That’s equivalent to eating 48 pounds of bacon. * * * 'Throw a couple of lamb chops on the barbecue and you'd find nitrosamine after a good grilling. You have to put this in perspective.' You'd find nitrosamine—a category of carcinogen that includes NDMA—but you wouldn't find 17 micrograms of it."
(i) View chemical structures only:
(A) N-nitrosodimethylamine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Nitrosodimethylamine
(B) nitrosamine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrosamine
(C) nitroso
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitroso
(D) amine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amine
(ii)  valsartan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valsartan
(is taken by mouth; Use in pregnancy may harm the baby; is an angiotensin II receptor antagonist [ie. occupy the receptor but does not activate it (receptor); activation constricts blood vessels == which is what angiotensin means, with angio from Ancient Greek and tension from Latin -- and hence causes higher blood pressure]; came into medical use [ie, on sale] in 1996)

(c) "The FDA has a rigorous approval process for new drugs. Companies conduct clinical trials in humans over several years to prove a drug is safe and effective. But 90% of all medications prescribed to Americans are generics. * * * Companies manufacturing generic drugs [with the same chemical structures] have to show only that patients will absorb them at the same rate as the name-brand medications they mimic. At least 80% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs, for all drugs are made in Chinese and Indian factories that US pharmaceutical companies never have to identify to patients, using raw materials whose sources the pharmaceutical companies don't know much about. The FDA checks less than 1% of drugs for impurities or potency before letting them into the country. * * * In 2008 the FDA opened three posts in China and announced plans to dramatically increase the number of inspectors there. By 2014, it had closed its offices in Shanghai and Guangzhou, leaving only the Beijing office with inspectors who could visit Chinese factories on short notice. * * * the name of the company behind the [FDA's valsartan] recall—Solco Healthcare US * * * Solco is based in Cranbury, NJ, and owned by Huahai. The yellow oval pill [valsartan] she took every night was made in a factory in Linhai, in Zhejiang province, about three hours south of Shanghai by high-speed train.  Lingai 浙江省台州市临海市m which sits between Kuocang Mountain 括苍山 and the East China Sea, is a prosperous city known for having its own Great Wall 台州府城墙 又称江南长城 and the country's best mandarin oranges. * (* * Chen Baohua 陈保华, educated at Zhejiang University of Technology 浙江工业大学 [at 杭州市] * * * founded Huahai in 1989, when he was 26. He started with $5,000 and 12 employees who mixed chemicals in a one-room warehouse. China was becoming an important source of raw materials to the drug industry, offering prices at least 10% lower than its main rival, India. * * * in 2006 briefly joined Forbes's list of the 400 richest Chinese, at No 363, with an estimated net worth of $101 million. * * * Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis AG spent more than $1 billion to develop Diovan, whose active ingredient is valsartan. Diovan went on the market in 1996 and became the best-selling blood-pressure medication in the world. In 2007, it accounted for 20% of Novartis's $24 billion in pharmaceutical sales. It would continue to be a multibillion-dollar drug until Novartis’s European patent expired in 2011 and its US patent expired in 2012.  * * * Huahai was among those preparing to supply valsartan to generic drug companies. * * * The valsartan molecule is simple. * * * [And manufacturing process for valsartan consists of] a chain of six chemical reactions starting from basic materials. * * *  If Huahai wants to make its own version of a generic drug and export it to the US, it needs FDA approval. But if Huahai supplies the main ingredient to a company that finishes the drug and sells it in the US, it's required only to keep the FDA informed of any changes to the manufacturing process."

(d) In press, the article has a side bar titled "A Different Way," which appears at the bottom of the article online.