Official uses Net to make graft claims

An anti-corruption official in Hunan province has claimed that the China Food and Drug Administration and the Chinese Pharmacopoeia Commission have engaged in corrupt deals with "interest group(s)".

Lu Qun, an official at the corruption prevention office of Hunan's Commission for Discipline Inspection, said the CFDA "endorsed interest group(s)" and "caused huge economic losses".

He made the claim on his Sino Weibo account on Tuesday, but did not provide evidence to back it up.

He said his allegations centered on changes to the classification of two types of plant used in traditional Chinese medicine.

Shao Mingli, who was the head of the CFDA from June 2005 to December 2012, was responsible for the changes, said Lu.

In the country's pharmacopoeia, which was revised in 2005 and 2010, Jinyinhua, a traditional Chinese medicine, was split into two categories.

One was called jinyinhua and the other shanyinhua. Before 2005 both jinyinhua and shanyinhua could be called jinyinhua, as the two look alike and have similar properties.

It was permissible for patients to be given shanyinhua even though the name of the medicine on the prescription was Jinyinhua, said Zhu Qingwen, a deputy professor at the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine. "Both are used to cure inflammation," said Zhu. "Shanyinhua's effect is similar to that of jinyinhua.

"But after the pharmacopoeia was revised, prescribing jinyinhua but giving patients shanyinhua instead was not allowed anymore."

As a result, after 2005 many traditional Chinese medicine makers stopped using shanyinhua as an ingredient of jinyinhua as they feared they would be accused of making fake medicine if they continued doing so, causing farmers to lose out economically, Lu said.

He said that Shao, the former head of the CFDA, "manipulated" the categorization to benefit the jinyinhua industry in Shandong, his hometown.

Shao is now a vice-director of the Chinese Pharmacopoeia Commission, according to the organization's website.

The commission issued an announcement on CFDA's website on Tuesday explaining the scientific basis of the categorization of the two medicines. However, it did not respond to Lu's allegations of corruption.