A new national compulsory standard for toothpaste will become effective on February 1, 2009. It will place restrictions on the amounts of fluoride and diethylene glycol (DEG), a low-cost sweetener and thickening agent that is toxic for humans and can cause kidney failure. It also will eliminate product fragrance and foam requirements.

The new toothpaste standard is one of more than 23,000 national compulsory standards that are basically consistent with or even stricter than international standards, according to the Standardization Administration of China, the government body that is responsible for setting product standards in China.

When China gained World Trade Organization membership on December 11, 2001, about 50 percent of its national standards matched their international counterparts. China pledged to revise all its existing national standards in five years and make them more relevant to the corresponding international standards. The country has fulfilled this promise.

Liu Shujie, a researcher at the National Development and Reform Commission, said the government had taken action to revise all standards inconsistent with international practices in order to play a more active role in promoting global economic growth in the past years. The standard-based trade frictions and disputes that arose in recent years have spurred China to revise its national standards. About 80 percent of trade disputes concerning exported Chinese products occurred because of standard-based technical barriers, Liu said.

The revision of the national standard for toothpaste is a case in point. In May 2007, Panama found that two brands of Chinese-made toothpaste contained potentially fatal DEG. After that, similar safety scares prompted some other countries, including the United States and Singapore, to ban several brands of Chinese-made toothpaste, causing product manufacturers' losses of around $10 million. This was largely because Chinese toothpaste makers had adopted the 2001 version of the national toothpaste standard that had no strict restrictions on DEG or fluoride amounts. After the incident, China's food safety and product standard authorities revised the old national toothpaste standard.

More cases in the food industry have moved China to revise its national standards. The Ministry of Health has released a new standard for food additives, which took effect on June 1 this year. The standard stipulates in detail the amounts and applications of 1,812 food additives in 22 categories, based on a comparison of related standards of the United States, the European Union and the Codex Alimentarius Commission, a collection of internationally recognized standards and guidelines about foods, food production and food safety. Some stipulations are even stricter than the corresponding international standards. In the first half of this year, the Standardization Administration of China and related regulators revised 4,000 national standards mainly involving food safety and consumer product safety. As a result, the safety standards for food and other consumer products in China are now basically consistent with their international counterparts.