Q&A: Interview with US health secretary
Updated: 2007-12-10 17:24
Li Xing: As far as I know last year you came on a fact-finding tour. As you said, you visited a lot of places. High on your agenda was to find a way for China-US cooperation in health care. Could you elaborate on how much, and by how far China and the US have gone in cooperation or in establishing cooperation in health care and how we exchange our information. Has there been progress?
Michael Leavitt : Well there's some significant cooperation that the United States and China has. For example, last year we had more than 500 scientific exchanges between scientists and doctors in the United States and China.
We have an ongoing discussion right now about how we can have safer drugs and how we can have safer food and how we can have safer medical devices and how consumers in the United States can access devices that are produced here in China, and also those in China can access drugs and or devices from the United States, so that's an important cooperation.
We've also begun to have formal dialogue between our health ministries on how health care is organized in China and the United States. So we are making progress as we go, and I think there is a growing amount of cooperation.
Li Xing: Let's talk about food and medicine safety. Especially since July you have been chairing the inter-agency working group on import safety. This working group was established because of the media reports. Increasing media reports about import safety issues like toys and foodstuff, animal feed and medicine.
I've learned that you have come up with an action plan, with a lot of recommendations and even 50 steps working towards ensuring import safety. Could you elaborate on what this action plan is all about?
Michael Leavitt : First I would like to emphasize that the concern about the safety of imported products into the United States is not restricted to China. This is not about China and about the United States alone.
This is a subject that is being discussed all over the world. And in the United States, we receive products from hundreds of different countries or a couple hundred different countries. So our concern is more general than just China. Now there have been high profile cases where the media has discussed them a great deal. And we view these as warning signs for all of us that the existing system of product safety is not adequate. It's good but not adequate.
And things are changing. More and more of the products we get in the United States or that we consume in the United States are produced in other countries like China. So we're having to upgrade and continually improve the way our process works. So our president asked me to head the group that you've talked about. And we spent about six months making a concentrated study on import safety. We found that it was going to require some improvement on our part.
Li Xing: In what way? I mean, what specifics?
Michael Leavitt : Let me give you some specifics. One of the things we concluded was that our basic strategy had to change. In the past we have been at our borders and tried to catch things that were not safe, so we could prevent them from coming in. There's so much now that we simply cannot inspect everything.
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