Adverts for medical treatments which often contain fictitious or inflated claims were banned on Wednesday as part of the ongoing drive to improve trust in newspapers.

The government banned adverts for treatments for cancer, venereal diseases, AIDS, psoriasis, epilepsy, hepatitis B, vitiligo, and lupus erythematosus, as well as for services including abortion, as part of the ongoing drive to clean up the advertising industry.

The move follows an earlier ban on advertising breast enlarging products and height improving medicines in August.

The General Administration of Press and Publications and the State Industrial and Commercial Administration have issued the bans in an effort to improve public trust in newspapers. But experts have warned the latest ban could slash small newspapers' profits.

"These ads can account for up to 60 percent of the revenue of some small newspapers," said Chen Gang, professor of advertising with Peking University, noting that the adverts are often an important source of income for city newspapers.

The Beijing Times, a local newspaper in the capital, said the banned adverts contributed annual revenue of about 1 million yuan (US$126,000).

"The ban's influence on us will be limited because these adverts account for only 5 percent of our total advertising," said Meng Long from the paper's advertising department.

However, he admitted that the ban would cause a loss of 100,000 yuan (US$12,600) this year. "We will have to adjust our advertising business strategy next year," he said.

According to a recent survey by the Beijing's administration of industry and commerce, newspapers often carry adverts which make exaggerated or untruthful claims about their products.

The survey said at least 2,400 out of the 2,560 inaccurate adverts detected by the monitor in the third quarter of 2006 were published in newspapers, with medical adverts accounting for a large proportion.

"If we find banned ads through either our spot-checks, or reports we receive, we will initially warn the newspaper or magazine," said an official with the administration's newspaper division. "If the warning does not work, the newspaper can face having its business suspended as well as a penalty fine."
 
A quick glance at Beijing's major newspapers yesterday seemed to reveal less potentially inaccurate adverts, but readers have doubts about how long the effect of the ban will last.

"Simply banning these sorts of adverts won't mean the end of them," said Beijing News reader Yuan. "If they're banned in newspapers today, they will just emerge in other media tomorrow. The most important thing is to strengthen supervision and law enforcement."

Having lost the ability to advertise in newspapers, some of the advertisers involved have decided to stop advertising for now.

"We will stop advertising for a while," said a woman, surnamed Lian, who works for Beijing Houshengtang Pharmacy, which often advertises its vitiligo treatments in local newspapers.

"If the newspapers aren't allowed to run the adverts, we have to stop. So far, we haven't considered which media we may replace them with," she said.

(China Daily November 2, 2006)