China

8 held for faking rabies vaccines

By Chen Xin (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-09-27 08:04
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BEIJING - Eight people have been arrested in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region for producing and selling fake rabies vaccines that led to the death of a child, local drug authorities said on Sunday.

"They (the accused) will be prosecuted for the crime in Laibin city," Xinhua News Agency cited a statement issued by Guangxi's regional drug watchdog.

The statement, which did not name the suspects, said authorities discovered 1,263 fake rabies shots in the two-month period from January. Some 1,214 of the shots had already been used.

The fake shots, found in 13 village hospitals and 20 private clinics in Laibin, were reportedly produced by an underground workshop and sold for about 330,000 yuan ($49,250).

A man, surnamed Wei, who was a manager of a Laibin-based pharmaceutical company, allegedly purchased the fake shots and then sold them to local hospitals and clinics, according to local authorities.

Drug authorities have confiscated all the remaining fake shots, the statement said.

The vaccine scandal was uncovered in December last year after the death of a 4-year-old boy, local media reported.

The boy died three weeks after he was bitten by a dog in his home village in Laibin's Xinbin district.

His father, Ye Xiangan, said the child received six rabies vaccine shots at a village hospital.

After the shots, the boy developed fever and did not want to eat or drink, Ye recalled.

Local authorities said the boy was the only confirmed victim of the fake shots so far, adding that there have been no other reports of the fake shots causing health problems.

By June, health workers in Laibin had found all the patients who had received the fake shots and had given them a free standard shot.

In addition, 18 other kinds of problematic vaccine shots worth some 470,000 yuan were also found during the two-month investigation by the local drug watchdog.

"The fake vaccine case in Guangxi exposed severe loopholes in the country's medicine supervision," Guo Fanli, a medical industry consultant with the Shenzhen-based CIC Industry Research Center told China Daily.

The quality of medicines is supervised by the drug watchdog while their circulation is controlled by other government departments, Guo said.

"The unclear division of due responsibilities of those departments may have ensured the free flow of fake shots," Guo said.

Rabies has emerged as a major public health issue in China, Xinhua reported.

Last year, China was second only to India in the number of human deaths caused by rabies. Around 2,000 people in China die from rabies every year, it said.

China Daily