Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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Reuters NewMedia - Friday October 9, 1998
Police raided a farmer's house in the central province of Hunan and nabbed 13 suspects and 3,000 half-liter (17 ounce) blood bags, the newspaper said. Two suspects were later released.
The farmer's house was used to store illegal blood by 10 "blood suckers," illicit dealers who pay poor rural donors for blood and sell it to hospitals for large profits, taking advantage of widespread shortages of donated blood.
Three police teams destroyed five blood shops in Hunan's Wancheng city and sent the confiscated blood to be analyzed.
China imposed a ban on the sale of blood from October 1 and has recently stepped up a campaign to encourage voluntary donors.
China's illegal blood market, in which the poor and unemployed sell blood for cash, has provided up to 70 percent of the nation's blood supply.
Donors are paid some 100 yuan ($12) per liter (33.8 fluid oz) of blood, which can then be sold for much higher prices to desperate patients.
The illegal blood pool has been blamed for spreading hepatitis and the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), which can cause AIDS. Most of the blood is not screened or treated.
China in July announced that the official number of people infected with HIV was 10,676 as of June 30, with 301 having developed full-blown AIDS.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Public Health cautioned at the time that the actual number of HIV patients could be as high as 300,000 and could increase to one million by 2000. There is still no widespread testing for the virus.
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