Blood bank's secret cash store

SHANGHAI'S umbilical cord blood bank has more than turned a charitable facility into a profitable business - it has deliberately stored more than 200 samples of tainted umbilical cord blood while telling parents that the samples are good and charging them for storage, state radio said yesterday.

At least one of the samples is infected with hepatitis B, the report said.

An unidentified woman told China National Radio that the bank charged her another 1,000 yuan (US$137.7) in addition to the normal charges because her blood was infected with hepatitis B. The bank told her the sample was usable even though they had also refused an umbilical cord blood donor who was a hepatitis B carrier.

China bans medical facilities trading or profiting from umbilical cord blood, which contains stem cells that can be transplanted to cure blood diseases like leukemia and immune system disorders.

All umbilical cord blood centers must be for charitable use, the Ministry of Health rules.

Before applying to open the umbilical cord blood bank, the blood center collected 1,000 samples donated over three months up to August 2005, according to the radio's investigation assisted by the Southern Weekend newspaper.

By April 2007, the public section of the umbilical cord blood bank had a stockpile of 1,921 samples, the report said. That means it collected 921 samples in the 20 months after the center received permission to open the bank.

But during the same 20 months the bank accumulated another 3,163 blood samples from new mothers and stored these secretly and for money.

New mothers were charged at least 16,000 yuan for storage of up to 20 years, according to the report.

A woman, identified by the radio as Lu Yi, said she saw brochures promoting the blood bank while she was having a baby at a hospital in December 2005. One of her relatives had died of leukemia and this prompted her to want to store her baby's umbilical cord blood.

More than a month after she gave birth, the blood bank told her that her baby's blood had been tested and was all right and she paid a fee of 16,060 yuan.

However an unidentified insider told Lu in September 2006 that blood tests taken before her baby's sample was put in storage revealed it was infected and was potentially fatal for any transplant recipient.

Dozens of the bank's blood samples were found to be infected but the blood bank told parents after a second or third test that the samples "qualified" for storage.

Lu Daopei, head of the health ministry's umbilical cord blood panel of experts, told the radio that a sample is potentially dangerous even if bacteria were found in only one of 10 tests.