The New York Times - April 2, 2009
Sharon Lafraniere

The authorities at the Guizhou Province hospital traced the infections to contaminated blood from a single donor who had sold blood to the facility from 1998 to 2002. The police have detained the hospital's former chief on suspicion of illegally collecting and using the blood, according to Xinhua, the state-run news agency.

Hospital officials also blamed improper screening of the blood supply for the spread of the infection.

The tainted supply was discovered in September, when a former hospital patient developed symptoms of hepatitis C.

Xie Yong, deputy head of the Pingtang County People's Hospital, said that the former patient, a woman, had received a blood transfusion during a Caesarean section in March 2001.

He said that the hospital had purchased the blood used in the operation, even though it was not legally allowed to buy blood. "The hospital administrator's legal awareness might not have been very strong," Mr. Xie said. "I heard that the hospital had been punished once before for illegal blood supply."

Xinhua said that the donor, a 43-year-old woman whom it described as having traveled from another county to find a willing buyer, had sold the hospital as much as 42 pints of blood from late 1998 to mid-2002. Mr. Xie said the donor could have earned as much as $1,400.

The donor was tested in October and found to be infected with the virus. Hospital authorities then tracked down 64 patients who had received tainted blood in 2001 and 2002 and who had developed hepatitis, Mr. Xie said. He said the county had set aside about $238,000 to compensate the victims.

Mr. Xie said the hospital stopped buying blood in late 2002. Whether more cases of infection spread by the hospital will emerge is not clear, he said. "Right now we are concentrating on curing these 64 people," he said.

If untreated, the hepatitis C virus, which attacks the liver, can lead to fatal complications.

The hospital's disclosure follows a concerted two-year effort by China's Health Ministry to strengthen controls over the nation's blood supply. Thousands of Chinese were infected with H.I.V. in the 1990s because of transfusions of contaminated blood.

Last year, the Health Ministry said it had uncovered hundreds of cases of illegally sold blood, and it shut down nearly 5,000 blood banks.

In June, the World Health Organization said China was relying nearly entirely on voluntary donors instead of sellers of blood for its supply and had reduced the risk of contamination.

In a separate case, the Health Ministry said that hospital-spread infections had led to the dismissal of two other hospital chiefs. Twenty patients were infected with hepatitis C while receiving dialysis treatment in Shanxi Province, according to a notice on a ministry Web site, the state-run China Daily newspaper reported Wednesday. Investigations at those hospitals began after six dialysis patients discovered they were infected and filed a complaint last month, it said.
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