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Unsafe injections kill 390,000 prematurely
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2004-08-05 21:29
About 390,000 Chinese have died prematurely from unsafe injections, said a
think tank of China's Ministry of Health Thursday.
The Thinktank Health Research Center released the statistics at a seminar on
unsafe injection that opened Thursday in Beijing.
The results show that AIDS and HBV (Hepatitis B Infection) caused by unsafe
injections have caused 390,000 premature deaths and 6.89 million Disability
Adjustment Life Year losses. The direct medical spending on unsafe injection has
reached 142 million US dollars.
There are 3 billion injections in China annually, one fifth of the global
total. In poor western regions and rural areas, it's a common practice of
grass-roots clinics to reuse disposable syringes without effective disinfection
measures.
Statistics show that 30 per cent of immune injections and 50 perc ent of
therapeutic ones are unsafe. In western rural areas, more 70 per cent of
disposable syringes for single use are reused.
Unsafe injections have also caused damage to doctors and nurses. Guo Yanhong,
in charge of the MOH injection department, said one million medical workers had
been hurt by needles annually, some of whom got HBV or HIV/AIDS.
China has 840,000 HIV carriers and 120 million HBV carriers, 10 per cent of
the total population. Two thirds of the latter caught the virus before the age
of five.
Ye Lei, national director of the United States Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention Global AIDS Program-China, believes that the best way to avoid
unsafe injections is to use Auto- disabled (AD) Syringes which can be
self-destructed after the injection.
Ye said AD Syringes, with a price only 0.01 US dollars higher than the
current single-use ones, are cheap enough for rural consumers.
However, the product is far from popular in the country. Despite 30
manufacturers with an annual capacity of 1.7 billion, the annual sales of AD
Syringes linger at 100 million due to low domestic demand.
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