China says faces threat from illegal blood sales

BEIJING (Reuters) - China still faces a problem with the illegal sale of blood to hospitals, the Health Ministry said on Thursday, years after such trade sparked an AIDS outbreak in the central province of Henan.

China has promoted voluntary blood donations for decades and while they fulfill 95 percent of needs, the system had developed unevenly, the ministry said in a statement on its Web site (www.moh.gov.cn).

"The phenomenon in some areas of paying for blood supplies, or making money from blood, still exists, and there are hidden dangers for blood safety," it said.

The government would carry out a probe this year to "strike hard" against such practices, and try to better promote voluntary blood donations, the ministry said.

"We must earnestly deal with problems when they happen, solve them as fast as possible and come to a conclusion in a timely way," it added.

Hundreds of thousands of farmers in Henan were infected in the 1990s through schemes in which people sold blood to unsanitary, often state-run health clinics, making the province the centre of China's AIDS epidemic.

Authorities have moved to clean up the country's blood collecting centers in recent years, but underground blood selling has persisted.

China's blood products sector in general has problems, though.

This week the food and drug regulator said it had discovered fake plasma being used in at least 18 hospitals in northeastern China.

Fake plasma had now been found in the remote Himalayan region of Tibet, the official Xinhua news agency said, though most of it had already been seized.

Billions of dollars worth of counterfeit and substandard goods, from fake liquor and medicines to luxury handbags, are produced every year in China.

In one of the most highly publicized scandals, China revealed in 2004 that at least 13 babies had died from malnutrition in the eastern province of Anhui after being fed fake baby formula.

Nearly 200,000 people die each year in China from improper se of legitimate drugs, according to Jin Shiming, a committee member of the Guangdong Provincial Science and Technological Association.