A pharmaceutical company may have exposed HIV patients

A Chinese pharmaceutical company may have sold more than 12,000 HIV-contaminated blood products to the country's health system, Beijing News reported on Wednesday.

The news came after the Jiangxi disease control and prevention authority, a province of eastern China, reportedly detected HIV antibodies when testing a batch of intravenous immunoglobulin produced by the Chinese branch of Meheco Xinxing Pharma Co., Ltd., also known as Shanghai Xinxing. The lot was originally approved by the Shanghai Food and Drug Inspection Institute in October, but it is unclear how many products, if any, have been used on patients.

Intravenous immunoglobulin is a blood product prepared from human plasma. It contains antibodies that can help relieve a number of health problems. Shanghai Xinxing products are frequently injected into people with acute inflammation, Kawasaki disease and post-chemotherapy infections, according to the company's website.

Antibodies are produced when pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses, are present in the blood. Since antibodies often take specific forms, doctors can use them to identify the pathogens that affect a patient. Although the presence of anti-HIV antibodies in Shanghai Xinxing products does not mean that the virus itself is present, this possibility can not be ruled out.

"The detection of HIV antibodies … could mean that [the products] have been contaminated by the blood of people infected with HIV, "said Wang Yuedan, deputy director of the immunology department of Peking University's Health Sciences Center, in an interview with Beijing News. "In theory, the risk of HIV transmission exists … but the chances are slim."

The Sixth Tone calls to Shanghai Xinxing were unanswered on Wednesday.

In a statement, the Food and Drug Administration of Shanghai said it sent samples of the lot for further inspection and asked Shanghai Xinxing to immediately stop production and recall the products concerned. The Shanghai Health Committee also informed the city's medical facilities to suspend the use of the products in question, the statement said.

A spokesman for the Jiangxi Health Committee told Beijing News that no case of serum-attributable HIV infection had yet been reported and that the case had been forwarded to the National Board of Health.

Shanghai Xinxing is the leading manufacturer of blood products in the country. Founded in 2000, it has a strong presence in east and central China and has recorded a turnover of more than 98 million yuan ($ 14.5 million) in the first half of 2018 In the mid-2000s, Shanghai Xinxing dedicated 50 million yuan to the acquisition of two centers of apheresis – where patients have a plasma separated from the rest of their blood – in Jiangxi and central province from Hunan, respectively. Jiangxi Health Committee spokesman said the source of the contaminated sera was still under investigation.

In January, the Food and Drug Administration of China revised health warnings relating to doses of human immunoglobulin to clarify that even though specimens are subjected to screening for pathogens prior to To be approved, the sera are nevertheless derived from human blood. risk of infection.

Publisher: Matthew Walsh.

(Header image: GIPhotoStock / VCG)