mber Donnals was sitting on her porch25 when she heard an explosion, followed by screams. She turned to see her son, Bryan, 6, running toward her, his clothes on fire, and flames shooting up at the rear of the Donnalses’ mobile home. He’d been riding his newly minted, Chinese-made ATV...when suddenly it sped up and raced out of control...The red, 110cc four-wheeler barely missed a propane tank before crashing into the trailer and catching fire.

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

There’s nothing funny about this horrific story; fortunately, young Bryan did survive his severe burns. Still, it’s worth reporting to you the quite unintentionally comic remark of Bryan’s grandfather after the incident because it reflects the ongoing obliviousness of far too many American consumers to the threat of “Chinese junk.” Said Tim Donnals, Sr., who bought the ATV for the poor kid, “I didn’t think it was going to blow up, or I would not have bought it.” Indeed.

Well, we are here to warn you that from now on, any time you buy products from China, you should expect the worst. That’s because Chinese manufacturers have an exceedingly long history of junk that blows up in the night—or day—and an equally long history of junk that burns up and breaks up and batters and bruises. Here’s just a small sampling of the myriad disasters that can befall you, your family, your neighbors, your coworkers, or your friends if you remain as oblivious to the dangers as Bryan’s granddad:

• You break your collarbone when a faulty fender on your bicycle falls into the tire and throws you over the handlebars.

• Your teenage baseball–playing son catches an errant ground ball right in his “protective cup”—which shatters on impact, leaving painful cuts and bruising.

• A guest at your Super Bowl party suffers severe burns when the TV remote overheats in his hand.

• Your next door neighbor’s house burns down because of faulty wiring in a fan.

• Your best friend is “fragged” when the cell phone in his chest pocket explodes and sends bone shrapnel into his heart.

The obvious question that arises from these tales from the Manufacturing Dragon’s crypt is why we aren’t being protected from the myriad dangers. The answer lies in the abject breakdown of five major lines of defense that are supposed to protect you and your family from such abominations.

Your first line of defense should be the Chinese workers assembling your products. Overworked, underpaid, poorly trained, and often abused assembly line workers in China’s “worker’s paradise” are in no condition to do the sort of quality assurance that the Japanese, Americans, and Europeans take for granted. In fact, stopping a production line in China to fix a problem could get you fired. In his wonderfully told book, Poorly Made in China, Paul Midler has noted that reporting quality defects is likely to get any would-be whistle blower branded an “enemy of the state.”26

Your second line of defense ought to be the Chinese manufacturers themselves. They should have a strong motive to produce safe products if for no other reason than you will sue them if they don’t. Oh, but wait. We forgot to tell you. Even if you can find a guilty Chinese company to pin a problem on—a very difficult task—you likely won’t be able to sue in either an American or Chinese court. In the extremely rare event you win a legal judgment, just try collecting the money. Even sending back a defective product for rework is nearly impossible because the Chinese customs rules that prevent “importing defective products”27 offer a nice excuse to the manufacturer. The point: Liability flows across the Pacific in only one direction.

As for your third line of defense against Chinese junk, this should be the Chinese regulatory system. Good luck with that, too. China’s product safety bureaucracy is not only grossly understaffed. It ranks as one of the most corrupt in the world. It’s not just that Chinese inspectors can be bought at the rate of a few dimes per dozen. It’s also that many of the Chinese manufacturers producing deadly junk are owned by the government—and it will be a blue sky day in Beijing before the government will crack down on itself.

Still a fourth line of defense should be America’s own border inspectors and consumer protection agencies. However, what America’s product cops sadly share in common with their Chinese counterparts is an understaffing problem. As we saw in Chapter 2, “Death by Chinese Poison,” only 1% of the Chinese food entering America is even inspected. As you will soon see, we have a similar problem when it comes to agencies like America’s Consumer Product Safety Commission.

This leaves you with your fifth and final line of defense: the American companies stuffing America’s retail channels with cheap Chinese imports while they’re supposed to be conducting rigorous tests for quality control. What’s particularly troubling here is not just the naïveté of so many American corporations so ready to trust the Chinese to police their own factories. It’s also the willingness of far too many of these corporations to quickly deny culpability or even cover up problems whenever things go so terribly wrong. Hey, we’re talking to you, Walmart, among many others.

So, dear friend, please read this chapter and weep accordingly as we regale you with tale after tale of the myriad Chinese products that can sicken, maim, or kill you. Then, once you finish this chapter, dry your eyes and call, write, or e-mail your Congressional representative. It’s well past time for all of us to stand up just like Peter Finch did in the movie Network and shout, “We’re mad as hell, and we won’t buy your ‘Chinese junk’ anymore.”

China’s Appalling Record on Product Safety

Import from China. Save money. Lose your life.

—Leslie LeBon

Before we explain why Chinese manufacturers are so prone to producing lethal junk, it’s important to debunk one of the favorite myths of China apologists, namely, that Chinese products are as safe as other countries. The indisputable fact of the matter here is that while all countries on occasion produce defective and dangerous products—hey, even a company like Toyota known for its superb quality messes up big sometimes—the Chinese are in a league all by themselves.

To prove this, we could quote you statistic after statistic. However, this quick reprise of China’s product safety record in Europe should more than suffice.

Consider that in 2009,28 China captured fully 58% of the product safety notifications issued by European regulators while only 2% of United States exports to Europe were flagged. And please note: Chinese exports to Europe are only slightly higher than that of United States exports—18% for China versus 13% for the United States.29 A simple calculation with these ratios shows that Chinese products are flagged for safety violations at a rate 22 times higher than that of the United States.

Now here is the kicker. Despite vigorous attempts by the European Union30 to improve China’s product quality compliance—including a special inspection process for Chinese goods and sending European inspectors to China to train government officials on product safety standards—China still managed to outdo itself31 by capturing an astounding 61% of all EU notifications in 2010.

Here’s the broader point: You can’t trust Chinese regulators to protect you. Indeed, almost half of the time European regulators notify their Chinese counterparts of a product defect or safety violation, the Chinese do nothing. Nada. Zero. Zip. The major reason: The responsible Chinese manufacturer32 typically cannot be tracked down by government officials. (This is either a remarkably convenient circumstance for China, Inc. or a true test of the fly-by-night character of so many of China’s “black heart” factories.)

Why Chinese Manufacturers Produce So Much Chinese Junk

Only the Chinese can turn a leather sofa into an acid bath, a baby crib into a lethal weapon, and a cell phone battery into heart-piercing shrapnel.

—Ron Vara

Now that we know that China produces more dangerous products than any other country in the world even after adjusting for its huge global market share, it’s useful to drill down a bit deeper to examine just why this is so. As we shall now show you in a series of Chinese “junk-ettes,” the problems range from shoddy production methods and sheer stupidity to the more nefarious games of “Chinese Product Adulteration” and a national pastime of the Chinese black hearts we like to call the “Quality Con.”

Blame Shoddy Production: Chinese Drywall Leaves Many High and Dry

When Bill Morgan, a retired policeman,33 moved into his newly built dream home in Williamsburg, Va... his wife and daughter suffered constant nosebleeds and headaches. A persistent foul odor filled the house. Every piece of metal indoors corroded or turned black. In short order, Mr. Morgan moved out. The headaches and nosebleeds stopped, but the ensuing financial problems pushed him into personal bankruptcy.

—The New York Times

The Curious Case of the Corrosive Chinese Drywall provides a classic lesson in the art of shoddy Chinese production methods. The millions of sheets of drywall in question came to be contaminated with corrosive sulfurous compounds when Chinese manufacturers first started using cheaper, high sulfur gypsum. Then, to save even more money, the manufacturers cut the gypsum with power plant fly ash from China’s notoriously high-sulfur coal. As a middle-finger salute to this whole shoddy process, the corrosive drywall was then mixed and shipped to the United States without proper oversight or testing.

To be clear here, the sulfur contaminant in the Chinese drywall not only makes the air in homes smell like rotten eggs and attacks the respiratory system. The sulfurous gasses are so powerful they corrode pipes, cause appliances and HVAC units to fail, turn silver jewelry black, and kill family pets.

In fact, contaminated Chinese drywall has been found in as many as 100,000 new American homes in at least a dozen states. Those states hardest hit have been those with a hot and humid climate, which facilitates the release of the sulfurous gasses.

Florida is the epicenter of the crisis—with the only upside being an inadvertent but effective “Keynesian stimulus” to the local economy. Indeed, the business of replacing toxic Chinese drywall has boomed. Said Congressman Robert Wexler (D-FL), “Florida is hypersensitive to hurricanes,34 and this is like a silent hurricane. Whole neighborhoods are being wiped out....”

And speaking of hurricanes, New Orleans likewise got more than its fair share of this Chinese junk during the post-Katrina rebuilding process. Even the head coach of the New Orleans Saints,35 Sean Payton, had to move out of his Mandeville, Louisiana home. How’s that for a double whammy?

Writ large, China’s putatively “low cost” drywall has cost American homeowners as much as $15 billion above its purchase price. That’s because the remediation cost per home has run anywhere from $100,000 to $250,000. Of course, the vast majority of the Chinese manufacturers involved have not only refused to pick up the tab; as in our earlier European example, most can’t even be identified.

Costs to the taxpayers have likewise been stiff. To investigate the scandal,36 the Consumer Product Safety Commission incurred the highest compliance costs in the agency’s history, while the IRS had to create a special deduction37 just so affected homeowners could write off the cost of the damages and drywall remediation. That’s right, folks: The rest of us are paying for this drywall debacle in our tax bill even if we didn’t take the hit. If there ever were a lesson that cheap Chinese goods aren’t really cheap, this is it. If there were ever validation of the claim that “you get what you pay for,” this is it, too.

Blame Sheer Stupidity: Would You like Eczema with That Sofa?

One night I found him with blood all over his face38 because he had been scratching himself in his sleep. We had to put gloves on him.

—Rebecca Lloyd-Bennett

While shoddy production methods are the source of at least some of the problems with Chinese junk, sometimes it’s just sheer stupidity. How else can you explain the use of one of the most potent allergic sensitizers known to medical science—dimethyl fumarate—in the production of leather goods for sofas and other furniture?

This particular Death by China farce started in the hot and humid warehouses of Guangdong. That’s a province on the southern coast of China near Hong Kong and a place that Americans more generally refer to as Canton.

To prevent mold from growing on insufficiently cured leather used for pillows and cushions, a group of Chinese furniture producers began treating their leather goods with dimethyl fumarate. This “DMF” is an extremely powerful chemical39 that can burn its victims right through their clothing and that even at very low concentrations produces extensive eczema that’s difficult to treat.

The further interesting twist in this dumb and dumber tale is the way the manufacturers applied the DMF. They put it in small packets inside the leather cushions under the assumption that the mold-fighter would be released whenever temperatures got too high in their warehouses or along the transportation routes to market. What these Guangdong imbeciles didn’t count on is that the DMF would also be released from body heat as people sat on their chairs, sofas, and love seats. And released the DMF was, as thousands of consumers across Finland, France, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom quite literally got burned by their furniture. In the UK alone, close to 2,000 victims “suffered severe skin or eye complaints,40 breathing difficulties, or other medical complications.”

As with so many “Deaths by Chinese Junk,” young children would suffer the most. British infant Archie Lloyd-Bennett was burned over much of his body. In a heart-wrenching twist,41 3-year-old Scottish lass Angel Thomson was torched so badly that hospital staff felt the child may have been intentionally burned with cigarettes. On these suspicions, the staff contacted Social Services to report a possible case of parental abuse; Angel’s mother Ann was terrified for a time that her daughter was going to be taken away from her before the real Chinese culprit was identified.

As for the now-predictable epilogue to this tale: While a judge ordered the British businesses who sold the deadly leather goods to pay $32 million to the victims, the Chinese manufacturers got off scot-free—which is an insult to both our sensibilities and Scotland.

Blame Product Adulteration #1: It’s Impossible to Get the Chinese Lead Out

On August 2, Mattel recalled about 1.5 million42 Chinese-made Fisher-Price toys—including characters such as Dora the Explorer, Big Bird, and Elmo—that contained lead paint. In June, about 1.5 million Thomas & Friends wooden railway toys, imported from China...were recalled because of lead paint. Lead is toxic if ingested by young children.

—MSNBC.com

We are already familiar with the role of Chinese product adulteration in creating deadly food and drugs. We saw it in Chapter 2 when black-hearted Chinese entrepreneurs cut their costs by adding ingredients like melamine to pet food and chondroitin sulfate to heparin. Regrettably, Chinese manufacturers play the same game with many other products. Nowhere is this more evident than in the ongoing battle to keep heavy metals like lead and cadmium off America’s retail shelves.

Lead hits young children the hardest because their developing brains and bodies are particularly sensitive to even relatively small amounts of the heavy metal. From just small lead doses, young kids can suffer irreversible injuries that later in life result in anything from attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity to criminal behavior, brain swelling, and major organ failure. Because children are so much at risk from the effects of lead, it is all the more despicable that so many of the Chinese products contaminated by lead are aimed at our children—whether it be iconic Sesame Street toys, teen heart throb jewelry, or classic wooden trains.

And by the way, China’s black-heart product adulterers love to put lead in paint because, despite causing permanent brain damage, lead paint dries a lot faster and thereby significantly reduces production costs. Lead is also a low-cost and more pliable substitute for more expensive metals like nickel and silver in products like jewelry and trinkets.

As the MSNBC excerpt at the beginning of this section indicates, a poster child for Chinese lead woes has been the Mattel Corporation. Several years ago it was involved in one of the most high-profile product scandals in the modern era—one that resulted in millions of toys being recalled.

One important lesson to draw from the Mattel lead meltdown is that, contrary to the popular spin of some China apologists, it does not appear to matter how many years of experience American companies have in China or how closely they believe they have developed relationships with their Chinese suppliers. Companies like Mattel can still be fooled—and kids around the world can still be put in harm’s way.

Blame Product Adulteration #2: What’s That Powder on My Tricycle, Daddy?

In talking about lead, we would be remiss43 if we did not share with you this little story involving Chinese tricycles that were powder-coated with paint containing a high level of lead. This story is particularly interesting because it illustrates how sometimes all of us can be victimized by the “sins of omission” of complicit American corporations.

This particular “Trike Story” begins following the Chinese product quality scares of 2007 when a vendor to a major urban school district decided to test its Chinese-manufactured products for lead. These tests did, in fact, reveal the toxic tricycles.

At that point, according to a purchasing manager for the company at the time, the company put a “stop ship” order on all of the products to prevent them from going out to additional customers. The company then sent out its remaining inventory to a local vendor to have the powder coating stripped from each bike and the tricycles refinished. That was exemplary corporate behavior.

What was not exemplary was this “sin of omission”: According to the purchasing manager, the company failed to inform the school district of the tricycles that had already been shipped. To her knowledge, none of these bikes was ever recalled.

In fact, a recall would have been devastatingly expensive to the vendor and damaging to the long-term customer relationship. What this story, like so many others, illustrates is that when a reputable U.S. firm goes into business with a Chinese manufacturer to save money, it will often find itself catapulted into a compromising position. At least based on this story, you shouldn’t count on American companies to always “do the right thing.”

Blame Product Adulteration #3: If They Don’t Want Lead, Let Them Eat Cadmium

Walmart said Wednesday it is pulling44 an entire line of Miley Cyrus-brand necklaces and bracelets from its shelves after tests performed for The Associated Press found the jewelry contained high levels of the toxic metal cadmium..... Walmart had learned of cadmium in the Miley Cyrus jewelry, as well as in an unrelated line of bracelet charms, back in February...but had continued selling the items.

—Associated Press

Having been busted on numerous occasions for the unauthorized use of lead, China’s black hearts have figured out a way to adulterate their products with other equally deadly but less detectable heavy metals such as antinomy, barium, and worst of all, cadmium.

In fact, cadmium is a veritable cornucopia of catastrophe. A known carcinogen, it can trigger severe respiratory responses like toxic pneumonitis and pulmonary endema. Cadmium can also suck the mineral densities out of bones, thereby causing severe back and joint pain while increasing the risk of fractures; and it can cause kidney dysfunction that can lead to coma.

Of course, the extreme toxicity of cadmium hasn’t stopped China’s product adulterers from substituting it for the more easily detectable lead. Furthermore, China is the world’s largest producer of the metal. Regrettably, in this new variation of an old shell game, some major American corporations have been willing accomplices.

For example, in 2010, the Associated Press conducted its own undercover operation by running a series of independent tests on Chinese products. These tests found the presence of cadmium in an entire line of Miley Cyrus jewelry that Walmart had trumpeted as a teen exclusive. Inexplicably—and despicably—Walmart did not stop selling the jewelry for months on the grounds that it would be “too difficult to test products already on its shelves.”45 In this same year, Walmart was busted46 for selling cadmium-laced children’s pendants produced to match characters from the Disney film, The Princess and the Frog.

In a similar incident, Warner Brothers Studio Store in Burbank, California was caught with its heavy metal pants down when its Wizard of Oz Tin Man drinking glasses were found covered in lead at levels up to 1,000 times higher than the federal limits. High lead levels were also found in Batman and Superman glasses—while the decorative enamel in many of the glasses also had relatively high levels of cadmium.

When asked why they were willing to put American kids in harm’s way, studio executives for this American icon chose to protect themselves with this incredulous response, “It is generally understood that the primary consumer47 for these products is an adult, usually a collector.” Oh really....

Blame the “Quality Con”: While Our Corporations Lay Sleeping

A major customer complained that our bottles48 were being made too thin. The [Chinese] factory had quietly adjusted the molds so that less plastic went into making each bottle. As a result, when the bottle was given the slightest squeeze, it collapsed...After investigation, [we] discovered that the bottle had gone through more than one change. The factory had been making downward adjustments over a several-month period. The first bottles that came off the line were sturdy, but then they came out as merely acceptable. When none of us noticed the first changes, the factory decided to go for it again...Putting less plastic in the bottles generated savings, but these were not shared with the importer. The only thing passed on to the importer was the increase in product risk.

—Paul Midler, Poorly Made in China

It’s time for all of us now to become more familiar with one of the favorite games China’s product adulterers love to play with naïve and trusting foreigners. This game we call the Quality Con goes hand in glove with a complementary game we have dubbed the “Shanghai Sting.” Here’s how the games begin.

An American executive, hot to outsource his company’s production to cut costs, travels to China to find a cheap Chinese manufacturer. Upon finding a possible candidate, the American exec shows plans or blueprints to the Chinese manufacturer detailing exactly what is needed. At this point, one of three things can happen.

In the best-case scenario, the Chinese manufacturer enters into a long-term agreement with the American company, produces high-quality products at a low cost, and the two live prosperously ever after.

The second, far more likely possibility is the Shanghai Sting. Here, the Chinese manufacturer declines the offer to produce the product—but keeps the American company’s design. Within a few months, that same Chinese manufacturer is producing the American company’s product for sale as a competitor—using the American company’s stolen design.

The third possibility is the Quality Con described by Paul Midler in the earlier excerpt from his revealing book Poorly Made in China. The Quality Con starts when the Chinese manufacturer quickly produces a high-quality beta test version of the requested product exactly to specs. On the basis of that high-quality sample, the American company contracts with its new Chinese supplier for a given amount of the product on a weekly or monthly basis.

At first, the American company will be extremely pleased with the deal. Costs are cut significantly—often by as much as 50%. In this honeymoon period of the Quality Con, the American company makes money hand over fist; and it is at this happy apex in the relationship that the Quality Con begins in earnest. For, over time, the Chinese manufacturer slowly, and sometimes infinitesimally, begins to substitute inferior raw materials or components as a means of boosting margins. Shave a little here, shave a little there. But never shave too much all at once so that the quality adjustment is noticed.

Of course, the more naïve the American company’s management team, the more that team will trust its Chinese counterpart to continue producing quality products and dispense with intensive testing. In this way, the American company not only offshores its production but its risk management.

Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Cuts Corners and Kills Americans

Hangzhou Zhongce has refused to tell49 Foreign Tire Sales’ officials how long it omitted the gum strip from its manufacturing process....Foreign Tire Sales said it believed that it purchased about 450,000 of the tires in question from the Chinese company. Hangzhou Zhongce sold the tires to at least six other importers or distributors in the United States.

—The New York Times

A classic example of China’s Quality Con is offered up by the Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber company. This case is particularly interesting because it once again illustrates the ethical dilemmas that American companies can find themselves in the midst of because of the machinations of Chinese manufacturers.

The American company that got conned was Foreign Tire Sales of Union, New Jersey. In fact, Foreign Tire Sales had been importing tires for several years when Hangzhou began to use only half of a key gum strip that ensured the integrity of the tires. When this change went unnoticed, Hangzhou then escalated the con by leaving the entire gum strip out. This was done, of course, to shave a few pennies off the production cost.

The cost of this Quality Con has been numerous tire failures, the crash of an ambulance in New Mexico, and a fatal collision in Pennsylvania that killed two and severely injured another. Incredibly, the management team of Foreign Tire Sales “waited more than 2 years to pass on their suspicions50 about problems with the tires.”

Meanwhile, throughout this whole con game, Hangzhou executives stonewalled their American counterparts about the missing gum strip, but Foreign Tire Sales went on selling its tires anyway despite its suspicions. In the ensuing recall of close to half a million tires,5152 Foreign Tire Sales almost went bankrupt while Hangzhou ducked all responsibility.

Why You Can’t Trust American Regulators

In its Hidden Hazards series,53 the Tribune has documented how the understaffed and sluggish Consumer Product Safety Commission fails to protect children from dangers in toys and other products. The paper’s examination of Simplicity’s popular cribs underscores that, even in the aftermath of a child’s death, the agency can fall short in its watchdog role, leaving children vulnerable to a documented hazard. Interviews and records show that the federal investigator assigned to [Baby] Liam’s death failed to inspect the crib in his initial inquiry and didn’t track down the model or manufacturer. “We get so many cases,” the investigator, Michael Ng, said in an interview this month. “Once I do a report, I send it in and that’s it. I go to the next case. We could spend more time, but we are under the gun. We have to move on.”

—Chicago Tribune

One of the longest-running Chinese junk sagas in American history—the battle to keep our babies safe in their cribs and strollers—aptly underscores the point that you will not be adequately protected from Chinese junk by the American product safety and regulatory system. In fact, Chinese-made cribs and strollers have been cutting, suffocating, trapping, and strangling American children for more than five years.

The first recorded victim of Chinese cribicide was the baby Liam Johns in 2005. Said his grief-stricken mother on CBS News: “The side of the crib had come off54 forming a ‘v,’ which caused him to get stuck feet first and he got stuck in his neck at the crib. I gave him CPR and waited for the ambulance to arrive, and they took him to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.”

In fact, baby Liam would die in vain. Neither the company that sold the imported Chinese crib—the Pennsylvania-based Simplicity—nor the Consumer Product Safety Commission warned parents about the deadly crib danger in a timely manner. As the Chicago Tribune reported, “Despite 55 complaints, seven infants left trapped,55 and three deaths, it took years for the Consumer Product Safety Commission to warn parents about 1 million flawed cribs.”

Why You Can’t Trust American Corporations

The problem with China is56 that they have routinely shoddy manufacturing. There is always a chance that something they make is going to hurt or kill kids. In fact, the Maclaren Strollers did the same thing to young children. It amputated their fingers...I have to wonder why our United States’ companies are continuing to send work to China, effectively continuing to endanger our children. They must understand the danger, but in the name of profit they are willing to put young children and babies at risk.

—Gary Davis, retired CEO

If China keeps sending us so many dangerous and toxic products, why don’t American distributors like Foreign Tire Sales, Simplicity, and Walmart take more precautions before selling them to an unwitting and trusting public? That’s a very good question, particularly because many of the American corporations that have been implicated in various product recall scandals—from Burger King and Coca-Cola to Mattel, Walmart, and Warner Bros.—have very valuable brand names to protect.

As we have seen by how companies ranging from a tiny foreign tire seller to the behemoth Walmart have handled their Chinese product quality crises, the answer to this question is unsettling. It reveals that the knee-jerk reaction of far too many American corporations is to simply cover their collective derrieres—rather than own up to their own failures and redouble their efforts to police the Chinese junk they purvey. Because this is true—and because all five lines of defense against Death by Chinese junk have broken down—we now need to take matters into our own hands. We will show you exactly how to do that in the final chapter of this book. But in the meantime, we must come to understand that we cannot change our buying and consumer behavior until we fully embrace this fundamental principle:

Seemingly “cheap” Chinese products are really a lot more expensive than China-free alternatives after you factor in the risks of injury or death and then add to that buying calculus all the various legal, regulatory, and taxpayer costs that Chinese product failures entail.

So the first thing we all need to do as we shop is to carefully scrutinize all labels. If it’s “Made in China,” put it back down unless you absolutely, positively need it and can’t find a reasonable substitute. And if you positively absolutely have to have that product, do take appropriate precautions.