China’s food and drug safety record in recent years hardly inspires confidence: in 2007, Chinese cough syrup killed 93 people in Central America; one year later, contaminated blood thinner led to dozens of deaths in the United States while tainted milk powder poisoned hundreds of thousands of Chinese babies and killed six.

Not forgetting the dog food that came here from China that sickened or killed many pets…

But get ready Americans,   and the world should get ready for a new Made in China product — vaccines.

China’s vaccine makers are gearing up over the next few years to push exports in a move that should lower costs of lifesaving immunizations for the world’s poor and provide major new competition for the big Western pharmaceutical companies.

China’s vaccine-making prowess captured world attention in 2009 when one of its companies developed the first effective vaccine against swine flu — in just 87 days — as the new virus swept the globe. In the past, new vaccine developments had usually been won by the U.S. and Europe.

I wonder how many people that took that swine flu vaccine, actually knew it was made in China…

he government has since imposed more regulations, stricter inspections and heavier punishments for violators. Perhaps because of that, regulators routinely crack down on counterfeit and substandard drugmaking.

While welcoming WHO’s approval of China’s drug safety authority, one expert said it takes more than a regulatory agency to keep drugmakers from cutting corners or producing fakes.

“In the U.S., we have supporting institutions such as the market economy, democracy, media monitoring, civil society, as well as a well-developed business ethics code, but these are all still pretty much absent in China,” said Yanzhong Huang, a China health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “For China, the challenge is much greater in building a strong, robust regulative capacity.”

China’s vaccine makers, some of whom already export in small amounts, are confident they will soon become big players in the field.

“I personally predict that in the next five to 10 years, China will become a very important vaccine manufacture base in the world,” said Wu Yonglin, vice president of the state-owned China National Biotec Group, the country’s largest biological products maker that has been producing China’s encephalitis vaccine since 1989.

CNBG will invest more than 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) between now and 2015 to improve its facilities and systems to meet WHO requirements, Wu said. The company also intends to submit vaccines to fight rotavirus, which kills half a million kids annually, and polio for WHO approval.

Smaller, private companies are also positioning themselves for the global market.