Garbage bags filled with used medical gloves, some visibly soiled, some even stained with blood, fill the floor of a warehouse on the outskirts of Bangkok.
Nearby there is a plastic bowl full of gloves. Thai officials say migrant workers were trying to make their gloves look new when Thai health officials raided the facility in December.
There are many more warehouses just like in Thailand - trying to cash in on the demand for medical nitrile gloves, which exploded with the coronavirus pandemic. Millions of them, of lower quality, are being collected for export to the United States and countries around the world amid a global shortage that will take years to reduce.
A months-long CNNi investigation found that tens of millions of used nitrile gloves have arrived in the United States, according to import records and distributors who bought the gloves - and this is just the tip of the iceberg. Criminal investigations are underway by both US and Thai authorities.
Experts describe a fraudulent industry, with one of them - Douglas Stein - telling CNNi that nitrile gloves are "the most dangerous commodity on Earth right now."
"There's a huge amount of bad product coming," says Stein, "an endless stream of dirty, used and degraded gloves coming to the US, from which the federal authorities seem to be just beginning to understand the huge scale."
However, despite the potential risk to health care workers and front-line patients, US authorities have struggled to deal with the illicit trade - in part because protective medical devices were temporarily suspended at the height of the pandemic - and remain suspended until today.
Piles of dirty, suspiciously used nitrile gloves were found in a raid on a warehouse in Bangkok in December 2020. The Thai FDA said fraudulent companies were packing gloves like these for resale around the world.
In February and March of this year, a US company warned two federal agencies - Customs and Border Protection and the Food and Drug Administration - that it had received shipments full of visibly soiled gloves from a company in Thailand.
And yet the Thai company managed to send tens of millions of gloves in the following months, some of which arrived in July.
The FDA told CNNi it could not comment on individual cases, but said it had taken "a series of measures to find and stop those who sell unauthorized products using our experience in investigating, testing and reviewing medical products, both at the border as well as in domestic trade ".
cnn.gr