CNN investigates the illegal import of used gloves from Southeast Asia

fake dyed gloves

Caught in the act of breaking the law

Garbage bags filled with used medical gloves, some of which were found to be soiled, some even stained with blood, are scattered on the floor of a warehouse on the outskirts of Bangkok, Thailand. .

Next to it was a plastic bowl full of blue dye and some gloves. Thai officials said migrant workers were trying to “refresh” the gloves, when authorities raided the facility in late 2020.

Nowadays, in 2021 many of these warehouses continue to operate in Thailand, trying to cash in on the high demand for medical gloves made of nitrile material – demand has skyrocketed due to Covid-19 pandemic.

And then people pack millions of these substandard gloves for export to the US and many other countries around the world amid a serious global shortage of such medical items.

A months-long investigation by CNN (USA) found that tens of millions of fake or used nitrile gloves have arrived in the United States, according to import records and the distributors who purchased the number. gloves now. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. US and Thai authorities also conducted a parallel criminal investigation into the incident.

Douglas Stein – one of the experts in the field, said that nitrile gloves are “now the most dangerous item on Earth”.

“There is a huge amount of bad product flowing into the United States, an endless stream of dirty, used, and substandard gloves,” says Stein. It seems that federal officials are only now beginning to understand the enormity of the problem.”

Despite the great risk to frontline healthcare workers and patients alike, US officials are still struggling to crack down on this illegal trade, in part due to regulations governing the import of protective gear. has been temporarily disabled due to the complicated development of the epidemic and this has continued to this day.

In February and March 2021, an American company alerted two US federal agencies (Customs and Drug Administration) that it had received from a company in Thailand shipments full of gloves. Hands are below standard and stick to the ground.

Despite that, the Thai company still managed to ship tens of millions of gloves in the following months, with some shipments arriving as recently as July 2021.

Rising demand in the US for medical gloves

In early 2020, the demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) “increased through the ceiling” as the Covid-19 pandemic spread around the world. And the price of nitrile gloves is still high. Nitriel medical gloves are commonly used by doctors and medical staff to examine patients. The FDA (US Food and Drug Administration) has banned the use of powdered latex in the medical industry, and gloves made from low-quality vinyl are more common in industry and food processing.

The aforementioned gloves are mainly manufactured in Southeast Asia, based on limited supply from factories specializing in the production of natural rubber. Supply cannot increase overnight and production for major brands is ordered years in advance.

As governments and health systems rush to find medical gloves, dozens of underground companies are looking to quickly profit from this opportunity.

In late 2020, Miami businessman Tarek Kirschen ordered about 2 million gloves from a Thailand-based company called Paddy the Room. The businessman then sold the gloves to a distributor in the US.

Tarek Kirschen recalls: “We started getting calls from very frustrated customers. Turns out, these are all used gloves. They are washed for recycling. Some are still very dirty. Some even had blood stains. Some still have the date of manufacture 2 years ago… I can’t believe my eyes anymore.”

Entrepreneur Kirschen said he returned the money to the customer, buried the gloves, and alerted the FDA in February 2021.

According to Kirschen, none of the gloves he ordered were used in medicine. But a CNN analysis of import records shows that other US distributors received nearly 200 million gloves from Paddy the Room during the pandemic. It is not clear what happened next to the gloves after being imported into the US.

CNN tries to contact all importers. The majority did not respond but 2 importers said the shipments were substandard and the gloves weren’t even made of nitrile. One of the companies, Uweport, told CNN it could not resell the gloves it had purchased to medical companies as planned. Instead, they have to sell these gloves at a lower price to suppliers who specialize in supplying gloves to food processing factories, hotels and restaurants in the US.

The other company, US Liberty LLC, had a similar experience with Paddy the Room. They said they received the goods from another company in Southeast Asia. They said, “gloves had holes in them, had stains on them, and had different colors.”

Got caught here, moved to another place

Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration of Thailand (Thai FDA) has struggled to combat the fraudulent trade of nitrile gloves.

When Thai FDA employees raided Paddy the Room’s facility in December 2020, they found piles of trash bags filled with loose gloves of different colors, materials, and qualities. Workers at this warehouse are shoving old gloves into boxes of new fake Sri Trang. Sri Trang is a legal and well-known trademark of a glove manufacturer in Thailand. The brand said it does not do business with Paddy the Room.

Thai FDA arrested the warehouse owners but failed to prosecute them. The raid also did not cause Paddy the Room to be closed. Months later, Thai FDA Deputy Secretary General, Supattra Boonserm, said her agency had conducted another raid on a similar facility.

“They just moved to a new location, a new warehouse. Why is that? That’s because the demand for gloves is still high. There are still customers who want to buy.”

Thai FDA says it has conducted at least 10 raids in recent months and seized counterfeit or used gloves that were repackaged as new. During several such inspections, Thai authorities discovered workers in these facilities were washing gloves and then re-staining them.

Ms. Boonserm suspects these gloves were purchased from China or Indonesia and then exported to Thailand to be washed, dried, and repackaged. “Simply put, this is cheating.”. Therefore, confidence in medical gloves imported from countries like Thailand is declining. Instead, countries like Vietnam, with prestigious glove brands like VGlove, are increasingly gaining the trust of US importers.