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A blood thinner tied to the deaths of at least 19 people in the U.S. has a "possibly counterfeit ingredient," a federal agency revealed.
Raw components of the drug, heparin, are produced in China, reports The New York Times in a story set to appear on their Thursday front page.
"Routine tests failed to distinguish the contaminant from [heparin]," write Gardiner Harris and Walt Bogdanich for the Times. "Only sophisticated magnetic resonance imaging tests uncovered that as much as 20 percent of the product's active ingredient was a heparin mimic blended in with the real thing."
Officials with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) say they have not yet identified the contaminant and, according to the Times, do not know whether the presence of the contaminant "was accidental or ... deliberate."