MCLC: drugs made from dead babies (6,7)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: connie cook <conniba at gmail.com>
Subject: drugs made from dead babies (6)
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Isn't someone going to mention Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal"?

C. Cook

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From: han meng (hanmeng at gmail.com)
Subject: drugs made from dead babies (7)

Like Weihong Zhang, I also suspected that the drugs were fake, but
after I read the following report, I'm not so sure.

Han Meng

Source: Daily Mail (5/10/12):
www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2143294/A-truly-monstrous-medicine-The-Mai
l-investigates-Chinas-gruesome-human-baby-flesh-pills.html

A truly monstrous medicine: The Mail investigates China's gruesome
human baby flesh pills
By Steve Bird

Kneeling down in her cramped kitchen, the pharmacist opens her fridge
door and removes the freezer compartment drawer crammed with three
packages wrapped in black bin liners.

As she carefully opens the brittle bundles, she boasts of her ability
to use the contents to make a pill that can cure all known ills.

‘After taking two tablets a day you will feel the difference after
just one week,’ she says.

Even though the parcels are frozen, they exude an unpleasant smell
that quickly permeates her nondescript apartment in a small Northern
Chinese town.

But pushing the plastic freezer box across the floor to her new-found
customer, the woman, who works at a Chinese hospital, appears almost
proud as she says: ‘Choose one. Please, choose one.’

Each of the bags contains a single aborted foetus; one of them is said
to be of seven months’ gestation. The infants’ remains will be cut up
into small pieces, dried, microwaved and then ground down into a
coarse powder, to be made into tablets of an ‘alternative medicine’
that plays on centuries-old superstitions and folklore.

Each tablet, containing the infants’ flesh and bone, and possibly hair
and nails, are believed by many to have fantastic healing powers which
fight the ravages of ageing and are capable of defeating even cancer.

It is a sickening, cannibalistic and illegal trade that the Chinese
authorities do not want the world to know exists.

Yet it is disturbingly widespread. This week the South Korean customs
department revealed it had foiled 35 attempts to smuggle these
‘human-flesh pills’ across its border and seized more than 17,000 of
them from China in just nine months. The contraband was either taken
into the country in passengers’ luggage or posted in parcels
registered as traditional Chinese herbal medicines.

This grotesquely unsavoury industry appears to cash in on China’s
strict family planning laws, which limit most families to just one
child each and are said to result in 13 million abortions a year, the
equivalent of more than 35,000 terminations a day.

The country, which has a population of more than 1.3 billion, is said
to have ‘dying rooms’ in hospitals where unwanted newborn babies are
abandoned to perish. Those trying to avoid a huge fine for violating
the one-child laws have even been known to commit outright
infanticide.

Now, unscrupulous pharmacists, hospital workers and even the relatives
of those having abortions are making money from archaic beliefs that
consuming infant cells can cure and rejuvenate us.

This bizarre notion dates back hundreds of years to China’s Ming
dynasty. And the belief if that the nearer the foetus is to its birth
date, the more healing properties it harbours.

The true extent of the trade in China’s human-flesh pills emerged when
an undercover team from South Korea’s SBS television channel
highlighted the problem.

The footage taken by the team showed how placentas — the most common
form of illegal human flesh traded in China for alternative medicine —
are sold alongside the dried organs of creatures including snakes and
bats from around the world to satisfy an appetite for powders, soups
and potions said to have tremendous healing properties.

It also reveals how herb ‘clinics’ or ‘chemists’ in northern Chinese
towns, including Yanji, Jilin, Qingdao and Tianjin, sell pills made
from human foetuses.

Secretly filmed footage shows a pharmacist wearing pristine white
overalls at one chemist admitting that she stocks ‘human-flesh
capsules’.

She is filmed in a room containing huge wooden cabinets with row after
row of small rectangular drawers containing drugs and rare herbs, and
at one point she stands on tip-toe to reach a top shelf where she
pulled down a hidden bag of red and yellow capsules.

She opens up a pill, agrees that the contents give off a bad smell,
and then explains that the foetus that made this batch of tablets was
nearly seven months old before its life was terminated.

‘They were made recently,’ she says. ‘These are really good for you.
Take it twice a day. Don’t take too much, otherwise you will get a
nosebleed.’ After agreeing the sale with the undercover reporter, she
decants the tablets into a pill box marked with a prescription label
for back pain.

Later, another shopkeeper advises ‘patients’ to take the pills only
during colder months to avoid sweating out their health benefits.
Monstrous: The respect for human life seems to have been completely
bypassed as this Chinese pharmacist makes up foetus pills

What they fail to explain — quite apart from the appalling moral
issues raised — is just how dangerous swallowing the powdered flesh of
another human being can be. Tests on tablets seized recently by South
Korean border control officers found the contents of some were made up
of the DNA from three human foetuses.

The television crew discovered that the make-up of the pills they
bought were between 97 per cent and 99 per cent human. And they all
contained high levels of harmful bacteria, many of them of a type that
could only have come from decomposing bodies.

According to ancient Oriental lore, material from babies or foetuses
contains life-giving human properties inherent only in such young
cells.

They are credited with boosting stamina for the frail and old, as well
as improving sexual performance. They are also said to help those
suffering respiratory problems or lung disease.

While the trade in such drugs is thought to be more frequent in
communist China, smugglers see the capitalist state of South Korea as
an increasingly lucrative market. Pills that were once sold for as
little as 50p are believed to be fetching up to £25 among the
population of China’s affluent near neighbour.
According to the undercover team, the smell at this stage was
overpowering. Hair and nails were discernable in the human material

The pills used to be shipped to South Korea brazenly in clear plastic
cellophane bags, but more recently smugglers have had to become
increasingly sophisticated and use orthodox dark brown pill bottles,
with sealed caps and labelled with the names of legitimate drugs or
more traditional Chinese herbal medicines to evade detection.

Ground-up aromatic herbs have also been added to the capsules to try
to disguise the smell of what is, to all intents and purpose, rotting
dried flesh.

The frozen ‘raw ingredients’ (a euphemism for freeze-dried human
flesh) are also for sale. A single foetus fetches hundreds of pounds
because it can be ‘processed’ into so many tablets with a far more
lucrative street value. An entire placenta sells for about £100.

Perhaps the most distressing element of this horrifying trade is the
pitiless nature of the manufacturing process. During the undercover
filming last year, the SBS journalists saw how a foetus could be
turned into pills in just two days.

Once the hospital pharmacist had defrosted the foetus stored in her
kitchen fridge, she cut it into ‘manageable pieces’. Overnight she
dried it out on absorbent paper before slowly microwaving it on a low
heat.

According to the undercover team, the smell at this stage was
overpowering. Hair and nails were discernable in the human material.

Once it was thoroughly dried, the pharmacist placed the flesh into a
herbal grinder, not unlike a kitchen food processor, to render it down
to a coarse, light brown powder, similar to the texture of human ashes
following a cremation. That powder would then be put into soluble
capsules which were counted out into bags for packing, shipment and
sale.
Gruesome: These brightly-coloured pills hide a horrific inside - the
remains of dead babies

Those who have sold or taken such pills speak remarkably candidly to
the television team about the perceived effects of the tablets.

A Korean woman living in China explained how she had given her son the
pills because he had a lung problem. She says: ‘The hospital had said
they couldn’t help him. My child took the capsules for one month and
he got better.’

A small trader at a market in Seoul, South Korea, adds: ‘A couple of
years ago we took them many times. When we ran out I contacted my son
living in North East China who posted them to us.’ At that time she
was just paying about 50p per tablet, and would get them shipped to
her in batches of 100 or 120.

She adds: ‘It’s really good medicine. You will be jumping around
because you will be so full of energy. But the pills are now
expensive.’

Another woman had so much faith in the treatment that she bought a
foetus on the black market and ground it down to make her own tablets.
‘I would get it raw, cut it, burn it and powder it,’ she says, adding:
‘It’s widely known that it’s very good for you.’

Modern research has shown all such health claims to be baseless.
Indeed, far from being curative, the pills are far more likely to be
poisonous.

Earlier this week, China’s Ministry of Health spokesman Deng Haihau
said his officers would investigate reports of the trade, but said no
proof that such capsules were being manufactured had yet been
presented to him.
'Improvements have been made in the regulation of such drugs, but we
do come across bad practices'

Professor Dali Yang, University of Chicago's Beijing School

Last night a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman refused to comment on
the South Korean customs findings or the investigation by the
television journalists.

But Professor Dali Yang, of the University of Chicago’s Beijing
School, said that while there had been a concerted effort by Chinese
authorities to tighten up food standards, traditional medicines had
been largely overlooked.

‘The traditional Chinese medicine sector has been under-regulated and
this is because there has always been a claim by the manufactures that
their medicines contain a secret ingredient, but they refuse to offer
details,’ he says.

Professor Yang believes the practice of using human flesh in pills
exists, but is probably quite rare.

‘Historically, in traditional Chinese medicine, the placenta has been
used,’ he said. ‘If aborted babies have been used in this instance, I
would say it is an isolated case.

‘Regulation of such drugs in China is a work in progress. There have
been improvements but at the same time, because of the size of the
industry, we do come across bad practices.’

Clearly, if true, the claims by South Korean customs would  suggest
the trade is rather more widespread. And the concern in the months to
come will be just how seriously the Chinese authorities take the
allegations — for it is a state that does not take kindly to
criticism.