Seventeen members of a gang involved in the production of a fake
rabies vaccine have been detained, police in Heilongjiang Province said on Wednesday.
A total of 227 people have been given the fake medicine, police
said, all of who are now being closely observed by local health
departments.
The gang, which hails from the northeastern province, is said to
have passed off a mixture of starch and water as a genuine
vaccine.
Each dose cost about 0.6 yuan (US$0.08) to produce but was sold
for up to 130 yuan (US$17.18), police said in their release about
the latest developments in the province's largest counterfeit drug
case of recent years.
Earlier this week, two gang members were arrested in southwest
China's Sichuan Province where 29 people in Lu County
- most aged between two and 14 - had been given the bogus drug.
Police in Heilongjiang arrested 15 members of the gang last
Friday during a raid on their premises. As well as 10,000 doses of
the rabies vaccine, authorities seized 20,250 bottles of a medicine
used to treat cardiovascular disease and 211 bottles of blood
protein.
In total, police confiscated fake versions of 67 types of
pharmaceuticals produced by 53 companies.
Heilongjiang's provincial food and drug administrators said
yesterday that the fake rabies vaccine had been detected in
Mudanjiang City and also in Yilan and Fangzheng counties. An
investigation is ongoing, they said.
Fake vaccines can be fatal for rabies sufferers, who must be
properly treated "as soon as possible" after being bitten or
scratched by a dog, Hu Jiayuan, a division director with the
Shanghai center for disease control and prevention told China
Daily yesterday.
Figures from the Ministry of Health show that rabies killed more
than 2,000 people in China last year, second only to
tuberculosis.
It has also been on the country's deadliest infectious diseases
list for 13 of the past 14 months.
(China Daily August 3, 2007)